


Circles Back to You

by saunatonttu



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angsty Handholding, Canon Divergent, Character Death, Childhood Memories, Felix Hugo "To Love is to Suffer" Fraldarius, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Hanahaki Disease, Lots of it, M/M, Mental Health Issues, a kiss of dubious kind, author kindly reminds the reader that murdering said author is still highly illegal, briefly mentioned self-harm, happy ending? i don't know her, hurt with little comfort and with deception of occasional fluff, oh you'll know where it diverges :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 12:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 35,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20723945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saunatonttu/pseuds/saunatonttu
Summary: Every rose has its thorns, and Felix is choking on all of his and Dimitri's.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: No, I won't share my location so you can hire a hitman to kill me.
> 
> Initial inspiration for this was given to me by my friend, who went like "dimilix hanahaki au wyd". 35k fic is what I did. Thanks, Emil. 
> 
> Fic's separated in three chapters, roughly according to: pre-skip, between, post-skip. The last one somehow turned out to be the longest one of them. (This was SUPPOSED to be a 7k fic, but instead it possessed me for over a month and I haven't known peace since that random day in August.)
> 
> If you're in for a 100% happy ending, this... is not a fic you'll enjoy.

i. rosemary. 

He was seventeen when it first happened, on the night of their return to the monastery from the practical training the students had been sent off to. That was the starting point for everything else, too, but for Felix it marked the beginning of a tortous road he would not be able to turn away from. Nothing as grand and ominous as destiny, which was a concept Felix scoffed at, but something equally forceful.

The three house leaders had disappeared seemingly without a trace in the midst of the chaos that the sightings of bandits had caused. Felix hadn’t paid much mind to where everyone else had been going, much less the boar’s whereabouts, but he might’ve been the first to notice them missing – aside from the boar’s manservant, whose darting eyes betrayed the worry he felt. Felix hadn't said anything; he hadn't needed to.

_How foolish,_ Felix thought. As if the boar could be felled by mere _bandits_. It was a waste of time worrying about a scenario like that, when other things were far more likely to happen.

Frankly speaking, Felix was thankful for the chance to not have to look at the prince’s face right then. It had been two years since the last time outside the Academy, and the memories of that time still much too fresh and poignant on his mind, like a wound that refused to close.

Dimitri… how bitter it was that the boy he remembered had been replaced by _that_ thing.

As he sharpened his sword in peace, outside the camp the students and the accompanying teachers had set up, he coughed. An inconspicuous sound, nothing unusual with how it came out, but the small blue petals that followed it got his attention as they fell upon one of the hands holding the blade over the whetstone.

The petals were hardly even the size of his pinkie, but the confusion they evoked in Felix was bothersome enough.

Well. As long as it wouldn’t get in the way of his weapon maintenance and training, Felix really didn’t care where those petals came from.

That was his first mistake among the many more he would make.

ii. red & pink anemone.

The boar’s gaze slid over him whenever there was no absolute need to regard him. After their confrontation about the events two years ago, Felix was glad for this, but still his skin prickled with an underlying frustration that he didn’t know the cause for. He still couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and he felt entirely too vindicated whenever the boar’s lips quivered the slightest before settling into a thin line from his aggravating words.

It wasn’t as though Felix took every opportunity to torment him. No, he wasn’t like that – even though the beast deserved no such mercy from him.

(If he was taking out his grief on the shell of the Dimitri he once knew perfectly, well, no one had called him out on it – and no one would.)

Still, Dimitri’s eyes straying from him whenever they so much as threatened to make eye contact also burned holes in Felix, a sensation whose origins he had no clue to how to locate. That hadn’t been what he wanted – what he wanted was –

It was around this time that Felix began coughing out petals again, some weeks after the first incident. Not blue ones, but pink and red and each were coated in his saliva. To someone else, they would have made a rather pretty arrangement, Felix supposed whenever he wiped his hands with a cloth. To him, though, they reminded of faded blood on armour and pretty blushes on pale cheeks from days long gone.

Felix ignored these strange events. Annoying as they were, they hadn’t yet proven out to inconvenience him in any other shape than making it harder to fall asleep at night.

iii. daffodil.

His old man had come to visit the monastery, and Felix did all he could do to be as unavailable and gone from the dormitory as possible. He stayed as far away from the Knights’ Hall, too. The boar tended to hang around there, and so Felix thought his old man would too, under the pretense of caring for Dimitri when all he really was looking at was the ghost of the passed king.

Felix had always hated the way his father looked at Dimitri after the Tragedy – like Dimitri was nothing more than a miniature version of the late king. Perhaps Felix was just mad about the way Rodrigue had spoken of Glenn’s death and he’d begun to look too much into the way the old man interacted with Dimitri. Perhaps that was true. But Felix had never been able to rid himself of the feeling, and seeing the boar and the old man together left a nauseating taste in his mouth even now.

He’d been passing through the entrance hall when he caught a fleeting glimpse of them. He quickly turned around and took the longest possible road to the training grounds, skulking through the first floor of the dormitory and the courtyard beside it. If he’d met with both of them, he probably wouldn’t have been able to avoid sharing a meal with one or both.

And that would have reminded him too much of the old times, which he very pointedly tried to avoid thinking too hard about. He had enough ghosts to battle with, he didn’t need more.

So he found himself at the training grounds, seated at the edge of it rather than going to train by himself as a familiar choked-up feeling tickled his throat. When the coughs came, Felix clamped his palm over his mouth to silence it despite the glaring lack of people around him. The coughing wrecked him and his frame, leaving him breathless and his throat aching, and when he pulled his hand away, he wasn’t surprised to find bright yellow and saliva-coated petals upon his palm.

_Daffodils_, Felix realized numbly, and he shook his hand to rid himself of them.

”Chivalry,” he muttered, recalling one of the boring and onesided conversations about flower language Sylvain had forced upon him.

_The girls really dig a sensitive guy, you know?_ he’d said, and Felix had been close to smacking him with the hilt of his practice sword back then.

The memory of it only worsened Felix’s mood, and so he gathered himself from the ground and once more wiped his hand onto the fabric of his trousers before sauntering off.

(”It can also mean unrequited love, though… so not a great gift to give a girl you wanna impress after all, huh?”)

iv. wallflower.

Their class had missions just like the other two, and this one took them to deal with bandits en route to the Empire. They usually posed little threat to the students with combat training under their belts, but accidents could still happen.

And happen they did.

Perhaps the professor was more scatterbrained than usual, perhaps the students were, or perhaps the bandits simply were better organized than what the students and the professor had grown accustomed to.

Either way, it all amounted to a big, scattered mess on the foggy battlefield, and Felix didn’t like how it reminded him of the time he’d been fifteen, right by Dimitri’s side and–

A few swings of his sword sliced through the bandits easily enough, once Felix got used to their irregular rhythm of movement. The adrenaline of battle got him going, perhaps recklessly but not as thoughtlessly as some thought, and he held his own just fine even separated from others. Easier to fight without anyone holding him back.

And yet, as the Goddess would have it, Felix stumbled upon the boar’s fight. On foot, because somehow the boar had come down from his high horse in the most literal sense of the phrase, and movements sluggish as he parried off a bandit. Too sluggish, and the boar tripped over his own feet when he’d been forced to back off. The sharp blade of an axe flashed, and Felix’s reflexes took over as he sprinted to deflect the downward swing, heart pounding to the rhythm of his steps–

The axe slipped off the bandit’s hands, the man obviously not having expected anyone to come between him and his prey. Felix’s teeth ground together, and his blade met with the man’s flesh in the next moment, more blood scattering over Felix’s clothes. Nothing unusual, not even in this battle, and Felix kicked the man’s dying body away before he turned his attention to the man he had foolishly rushed to protect amidst the chaos.

The fresh blood running down from the side of Dimitri’s head clued Felix in on what must have happened, and – traitorously – Felix’s heart skipped a worried beat at the sight.

”Fell off from your high horse, did you?” he asked, not as harshly as he intended, as he bent down to Dimitri’s side and pushed his hand over the wound where the blood was trickling down from. Dimitri only stared blankly at him, eyes distant and unseeing, and Felix’s stomach clenched. He pressed his hand over the wound, and this time Dimitri flinched, blinked out of the stupor he’d fallen into.

_That’s better_, Felix thought, and immediately loathed the sense of relief that flooded into him.

”Felix?” Dimitri’s eyes remained clouded, but at least they regarded him now with some semblance of recognition.

”Looks like a concussion,” Felix muttered, mostly to himself. The blood stuck to his hand when he pulled it away, wet and plentiful, and Felix grimaced as he pulled away from Dimitri and looked down at the bloodied glove. ”What were you _doing_ out here, boar prince? Getting yourself dropped on your head like that.”

”Mercedes,” Dimitri muttered, wincing as he touched the side of his head where the wound was. ”Two of them surprised her, and...” Dimitri glanced away, pursing his lips thin. ”My horse got spooked.”

Felix's lips pursed together tighter in dismay.

”You’re going to get yourself killed like this,” he said. ”What good will that do? Protecting someone and then dying.”

”Perhaps that would be the point of it,” Dimitri murmured, eyes glazed over and voice low like the words weren’t meant for Felix to catch.

Felix’s chest constricted as he finally sheathed his sword, even if it was only so he could grab Dimitri by the chest of his clothes. Around them, sounds of battle went on, but Felix cared not as he stared hard at his once-friend’s face. ”I hate that stupid knightly code of yours,” he said, spiteful and desperate at the same time, ”and I won’t let you pull that stunt on me or anyone else that needs you around for the Kingdom’s future. Got it?”

Dimitri blinked owlishly at him, and anyone else would have found it cute but Felix. Slowly, Dimitri’s lips stretched into a smile. ”Did you just imply _you_ need me as well, Felix?”

”What – _no,_ I did not!”

The boar’s eyes squinted with dizzied mirth. ”Perhaps I misheard, then.”

”You have a concussion,” Felix said, crossing his arms over his chest and pounding heart. He gave up, and looked away into the fog. He really shouldn’t have allowed himself get distracted. ”Definitely not in your right mind.”

In the end, when the battles ended and the fog cleared out, Felix couldn’t say for sure who those words had been directed to.

As Mercedes treated to the boar’s wound, Felix hid himself and coughed up a myriad of petals, all from the same flower but of different colours. Red, yellow, orange – the petals formed a wet colour scheme of a sunset on the palm he coughed them into, and Felix grimaced as he hastily wiped his gloved hand clean.

He didn’t need two mysteries bothering him. He really didn’t.

v. lavender.

Because the students were mostly noble teenagers, it was only natural that gossip and rumours ran around like an untamed horse across the plains. As much as Felix tried to avoid the worst gossipers, he couldn’t avoid all the rumours. After all, one of the nosy people happened to be his, urgh, childhood friend. Who also happened to find some masochistic enjoyment from talking to him.

”There’s this disease that’s been going around for the past few months,” Sylvain explained to him as Felix was trying to get his usual practice in after the worst student rush at the training grounds had eased.

”I don’t need to hear what you do with the girls you take out to town,” Felix grumbled, a sour taste on his tongue just at the thought of where Sylvain might be going with this. He focused his thoughts into picturing shoving a wooden sword into the other’s side, and that eased his irriation off. A little.

”Not _that_ kind of disease!” Sylvain sounded absolutely affronted by the suggestion, and Felix’s lips curled upwards despite himself. Sylvain sighed, before his voice returned to the casual, conversational tone from before. ”I meant… people have been getting sick around the continent, you know? They spit out flower petals. Isn’t it weird?”

Felix nearly stopped mid-thrust. ”What?”

”Got your attention, did I?” Sylvain said, and when Felix turned to look at him, he had that infuriatingly familiar grin on his face, hands raised to the back of his head. ”No one really gets it, but girls are all over it, you know. Some sort of lovesickness, they call it.”

”What, just because people spit out flowers?” Felix snorted. ”How silly.”

”Well, flowers and love go hand-in-hand,” Sylvain said, sounding patient and smug as though he were talking to a little child. ”It’s as worthwhile a theory as any, isn’t it?”

”As worthwhile as listening to you is,” Felix muttered as he went back to mindlessly practicing on the dummy in front of him. If what Sylvain said lingered on his mind afterwards, like an itch he couldn’t scratch off, no one else had to know about it.

The lavender petals that he spat into his palm right before bed and after crossing paths with the boar prince in the dormitory hallway didn’t mean a damn thing.

vi. yellow hyacinth.

”As much as I consider the person I called a friend dead,” Felix said at the dinner after the Battle of the Eagle and Lion, ”I will admit you did lead us well out there.”

”You do have a way of starting a conversation over dinner, Felix,” Dimitri said, his lip curled into a hint of a smile. ”A compliment, even.”

”Don’t get used to it.”

”I wouldn’t dream of it.” Dimitri glanced at him, a question in his eyes, before turning back to moving food on his plate without eating it.

From this perspective, Felix supposed one would find the boar handsome, especially if one wasn’t privy to his true nature. As overly stylized as his hair was, he managed to carry a natural, naive charm that would endear him to many people.

Too bad Felix knew better than to accept that facade.

(Even so… perhaps there was a part of him that…)

”I forgot,” Dimitri piped up as Felix had returned to his own meal, ”to thank you for the last time.”

Felix’s hand paused midway of pushing the spoon past his lips. Over the loud celebrations across the dining hall, his much too loud voice went unnoticed. ”What are you on about?”

”The time with the bandits,” Dimitri clarified, the sincerity in his eyes painful to look at so Felix opted to stared down at his meal instead, ”when I fell off my horse.”

_I don’t want you to actually die,_ Felix thought, but saying those words out loud… would be far too much honesty than what he could possibly handle. So, instead, he said, ”And you keep making me regret it.”

Leaving certain emotions without confrontation was so much easier than dealing with them. But, in the end, they only kept piling up in the corners of Felix’s mind, abandoned and pushed aside until the day would come when they’d overwhelm him.

But today wasn’t that day.

”Even so,” Dimitri said, clearing his throat as if he were about to say something embarrassing, ”thank you. For… what you said then, too.”

It had been a couple weeks since then, so it took a moment before Felix realized what Dimitri referred to. When he did, his face twisted into a scowl. ”I only stated the obvious, nothing more.”

”Well, it wasn’t so obvious to me,” Dimitri insisted, brows furrowed subtly as he looked down at his untouched meal. ”Somehow, I...”

Before the boar could finish whatever it was he had intended to say – though Felix had an idea where he’d been going with his words – Claude had already come up and landed his hand on Dimitri’s shoulder. Felix definitely didn’t pay mind to the casual touch Dimitri’s shoulders relaxed at after the initial surprise.

”Your Princeliness,” Claude said, and Felix saw him bend over Dimitri’s other shoulder. Something about the cheer in his voice rubbed Felix the wrong way, in a similar manner as Sylvain’s. ”How long do you intend to keep the princess and I waiting, hm? You didn’t forget the tradition of the house leaders sharing a meal together, did you?”

Dimitri, to his credit, didn’t seem _too_ startled by Claude’s sudden appearance out of nowhere. ”No, I...” Dimitri hesitated, and his eyes met with Felix’s unimpressed stare. Dimitri pursed his lips before looking up over his shoulder. ”I’ll be right there. My apologies for making you two wait up on me.”

”We’ll be waiting, Your Highness.”

Felix caught the wink Claude sent Dimitri’s way, but didn’t have much time to ruminate over it. Just as suddenly as he had appeared, Claude vanished, leaving behind an oddly solemn Dimitri and just as oddly annoyed Felix, whose hand gripped his spoon much harder.

”I’m,” Dimitri struggled to say, and Felix glanced just at the right time to see Dimitri’s hand rub at the back of his neck, as if embarrassed by something.

Frankly, Felix had no idea what he was trying to say this time, but it didn’t matter either way. So he sighed and eased his grip on the spoon. ”If you were supposed to be elsewhere,” he said, bitterness in his mouth, ”don’t waste your time on me, boar. Save us both the time and effort.”

Dimitri studied him for several seconds, brows subtly furrowed as he obviously tried to interpret Felix’s behaviour into a language he could comprehend. Apparently failing, Dimitri’s shoulders sunk with his sigh. ”I… I will see you later, Felix?”

The question in his voice made Felix grimace. ”If you don’t go blind before tomorrow.”

Dimitri’s laugh was short, forced, and so polite Felix wanted to strangle him. ”I should hope not,” he said. ”I would miss your face, Felix.”

And with that, the boar prince picked up the tray of food and left the table and Felix behind, one considerably more confused than the other.

How was he supposed to take _that_?

The narrow yellow petals Felix coughed into his hands some time later didn’t offer any answers, either, only more mysteries.

Lovesickness, Sylvain had called it.

_Ha_, Felix was tempted to snort. In what universe?

vii. azalea.

Remire village as an experience had been anything but pleasant, and the aftermath even less so. Everyone was coughing from the smoke, and Felix would have found it relieving to be coughing for a different reason than usual, had it not been for the petals that descended down to his palms each time he uncovered his mouth.

Asides from the horrible violence the villagers had been driven to – and that _was_ disturbing to watch as it made even Felix nauseous – the major issue lay with the people experimenting on them.

And… the boar prince’s fraying stability.

Felix couldn’t help watching him from some distance, even as he still coughed up both slime and petals with a strange clawing pain creeping up his lungs. From where he was, he saw Dimitri’s agitated, twitching movements clearly as he ran a hand through his hair, occasionally tugging at the blond strands out of whatever feeling it was that had possessed him.

Even the boar’s ever present manservant wasn’t having much luck with him, as Dimitri kept shooing him away with nervous gestures.

Honestly, it reminded Felix of –

Felix’s train of thought got broken off by another coughing fit, and this time it had him bending his back and leaning over his knees as he crouched in a meek attempt at alleviating the wave of nausea and dizziness. A feeling scratched through his lungs until Felix was sure he was going to pass out – until it vanished as soon as it had come, leaving him breathless and heaving over his own knees. _Pathetic_, he thought, _but not as pathetic as him._

He could fool himself just a little longer.

When he later that night slipped into Dimitri’s room, Felix wasn’t exactly thinking. He only knew Dimitri had been pacing around again after a dream, and considering the day’s events, it must have been exceptionally bad. Only the screams had travelled into Felix’s room, but he knew him well enough to guess what the boar was up to. He’d seen enough at the village.

(Sylvain always slept like someone had given him sedatives in his food – otherwise Felix suspected he might have been aware of Dimitri’s reoccurring nightmares that kept waking the prince up. At least that was when Sylvain wasn't sneaking out to the local town outside the monastery.)

They used to sneak into each others’ rooms all the time when they were younger, and a handful of times after they both lost too many important people in Duscur. If anyone were to ask why Felix was doing it now, he could call it an old habit and he wouldn’t be exactly lying about it.

The dormitory rooms didn’t have locks – academy policy, though certain students broke it in their desperate need for privacy – which made sneaking into Dimitri’s room all the more easier, as if it being right next to Felix’s didn’t already make it easy enough. In any case, Felix only had to take a few steps from his own door to reach and open Dimitri’s before slipping inside without much of a fuss.

A single oil lamp on the nightstand gave just enough light for Felix to see every detail on that face when Dimitri’s pacing stopped and he turned to look at Felix in bewilderment, the haunted look in those eyes accompanied by dark circles. Felix’s eyes strayed to the mess Dimitri had made of his hair, which usually was combed and brushed back neatly asides from the bangs, before settling back on the pallid face of his once-friend. Still, the mess of his hair wasn't anything compared to the mess of the room: the floor was covered in both feathers and a destroyed pillowcase, along with shards of glass. Felix ignored them for now, only doing the minimal to avoid the glass.

”Well, you’re a mess,” Felix said and swallowed down the feeling that he had seen Dimitri exactly like this before. It hadn’t been pleasant then, it wasn’t pleasant now – even though both of them were so very different now compared to back in those days. Felix swallowd again to rid himself of the lump in his throat, agitated energy in his veins as Dimitri stared at him.

”Felix,” Dimitri said, voice strangled an uneven. ”What are you… why...”

”The walls aren’t exactly thick enough, boar,” Felix said, forcing boredom into his voice even though his muscles tensed as if readying themselves for an upcoming battle. His voice contained enough sneer to make Dimitri wince again, as though he’d received a physical blow. _Good,_ Felix thought, ignoring the twisting in his chest.

If possible, Dimitri’s face paled further, and he began fidgeting with his hands unsurely. Something cracked, and Felix was quite sure the sound came from Dimitri’s joints. The boar prince himself didn’t seem to notice – how fitting of a brute, Felix mused as he crossed the distance between them with quick, short steps.

If he were honest, he hadn’t thought about what he was going to do about the boar until now when a stupid impulse took over him upon seeing the state Dimitri was in. Maybe, somewhere deep inside himself, Felix was still just that stupid kid that had clung to Dimitri’s company like a damned leech. Maybe, a part of him still–

Felix silenced that part of himself as he shoved Dimitri back down onto his bed. The prince fell unceremoniously, breath knocked right out of him, but his hands instinctively reached to grab Felix down with him. His fingers curled into Felix’s shoulder, probably hard enough to leave a bruise later, but Felix paid little attention to that as he splayed his own palms down on Dimitri’s chest and leaned down.

He wasn’t _completely_ out of his mind, however. He hovered over the boar for a fraction of a minute, lips pursed as he wondered how to articulate the feeling on his mind. It turned out he didn’t have to, as Dimitri blinked up at him, eyes dazed but more aware, and murmured, ”You didn’t use to hesitate.”

”That was _before_,” Felix said, an ugly sneer in his voice that reflected the stabbing feeling in his heart, ”when Dimitri was still alive.”

Still, he took the invitation, if only so he wouldn’t have to look at the deep pain that crossed the familiar face beneath his own. Pain that was only partially caused by Felix’s words.

His lips pressed down against Dimitri’s hard and unforgivingly, much differently from the gentle and tentative kisses they’d exchanged as children after Sylvain had foolishly gone on about the act like it was a world-shattering experience. It hadn’t been: sure, Felix recalled a fluttery sensation and Dimitri giggling in the darkness they shared, but nothing had fundamentally changed.

Kissing him now – very different. Where he had once been soft, Felix was rougher, unkind with the way he angled his mouth over the other’s. His fingers curled into the chest of Dimitri’s shirt, nails digging in and pressing against the boar’s subtly quivering body.

”Felix,” Dimitri murmured, strangled like he was a drowning man desperate for a lifeline, for anything to hold onto. The sound of his name sent a shiver down Felix’s spine – one of disgust at what he was doing, he decided and discarded it from his mind along with the much too complicated thoughts he’d been having recently.

Felix bit down on Dimitri’s lower lip, demanding the boar’s attention – which he indeed got, if Dimitri’s hand moving up into his hair from his shoulder was any indication. The hand shook as fingers pressed against Felix’s scalp, right beneath the hairtie that kept the messily arranged bun together. Felix sighed against the boar prince’s mouth, despite himself, and something not quite foreign constricted within him.

”Get a grip,” he muttered as he pulled away and opened his eyes to glare down at the flushed yet still oddly pallid face beneath his. Dimitri’s eyelids fluttered until slivers of blue met Felix’s eyes, dazed but attentive as the prince trembled beneath Felix. From what was significantly harder to tell now. Felix’ fingers pressed down on the broad’s chest, curling before Felix continued in a harsh whisper, eyes locked with Dimitri’s, ”What good are you to anyone if you can’t keep yourself in line?”

Dimitri blinked up at him and Felix very much did not watch him lick at his upper lip as he took his time absorbing Felix’s words. Beneath his fingers, Dimitri’s heart beat, fast and uneven. Something sharp tingled in Felix’s lungs as he took in another breath.

”I don’t care about you,” Felix said, though the words sounded much too forced for his own liking, ”but people have a need for you. In Faerghus. _Here_, even.”

”Here,” Dimitri repeated dully, his voice breathless and choked up but eyes more vibrant than before. More aware of himself. The tightness in Felix’s chest refused to unwind, however.

”Blue Lions,” Felix said. ”You’re their…” A grimace spread over his face as he amended, ”..._our_ leader.” As if to emphasize those words, but without giving the boar time to mock him for them, Felix leaned in for another kiss, just slightly less demanding than earlier. Dimitri’s fingers ran through his hair in response, tugging the hairtie off in the process, but Felix minded it very little as Dimitri’s breath stuttered against his mouth, and the heartbeat under Felix’s palm raced like the horses Dimitri had been riding since he first learnt how.

Dimitri’s mouth pushed up against his, clumsy as ever with things more delicate then battle, and their noses bumped awkwardly until Felix tilted his head for a different angle, sucking in breath through his nose. He bit down, and the sound the man beneath him gave sent shudders through his spine, something too close to–

”Felix,” Dimitri said, fingers cradling the back of Felix’s head carefully, so very carefully, and something nasty scratched at Felix’s lungs again, something threatening to rise up his throat.

”That’s more like it,” Felix breathed, and this time it was Dimitri that brought their lips together hastily, with inexperience and desperation for distraction. Felix sank into the kiss, didn’t think of the much nicer ones their kid selves had exhanged in the dark out of stupid curiosity, and moved his hands to grip Dimitri’s waist.

There it was, the tingling sensation in his chest that always preceded–

Felix pulled his face away from Dimitri’s just in time before the first cough shuddered through him. He’d have rolled completely away if Dimitri’s hands weren’t effectively keeping him on top of the other, but as it was, he could only shift so his forehead landed on Dimitri’s shoulder instead of his face. He coughed hard, each second of it feeling like entire years, but nothing wet came up from his throat even as the scratching sensation crawled upwards, as if thorns were stuck in his windpipe.

He heard Dimitri’s voice, urgent and alert, calling his name, and it only made the feeling worse, something metallic rising to his tongue that Felix made the effort to swallow down just as Dimitri turned him on his back and effectively switched their positions from before. Felix had his eyes screwed shut, even as the coughing subsided and left only a trace of iron in his mouth. Felix exhaled. Inhaled. No petals stuck in his throat or mouth.

”Felix,” Dimitri insisted, his hand pointedly careful as it cupped the side of Felix’s neck. Despite himself, Felix flinched at the touch, at the awareness that a careless move on Dimitri’s part would snap his– ”Are you alright?”

Felix pushed the hand away from his neck and the weight of Dimitri’s body off him. ”Just fine,” he grumbled, disgusted with the out-of-breath quality his voice took. _You seem better,_ he almost said before catching himself. He flicked his now half-lidded gaze away from Dimitri, that strange strangled feeling in his chest making its home there. Felix brought a hand to Dimitri’s shoulder and pushed weakly, embarrassingly so. ”Get off of me.”

”Ah – of course. Of course.” He sounded hoarse, from bad sleep and from… just now, but better than what Felix had heard earlier, when the other had woken so violently from a dream that even Felix had been stirred.

Not that Felix had been in deep slumber to begin with.

”Good,” he muttered when Dimitri pulled away and stood up, and Felix very much ignored the physical urge to reach for the other again. A meaningless impulse – that was all it was. Still, Felix’s face burned as he pushed himself up much more shakily than he’d ever admit to anyone, and his gaze slipped past Dimitri towards the door.

”Are you sure you’re–”

”I’m _fine_,” Felix said. If the boar was inquiring after his wellbeing, he was more himself now, which was Felix’s goal with this. Not the same Dimitri as before, but the one that everyone else was used to. He’d settle for that. In time, the ache in his chest would dissipate, too. ”Go to sleep. You look pathetic like that.”

He didn’t turn to look at Dimitri’s face, but he didn’t really need to as Dimitri’s smile – a little forced as it always was these days – was audible in his voice. ”Thank you, Felix. Good night.”

Felix only made a vague noise in response, not bothering with the niceties. It was only after he had slipped out of the door that he realized two things: 1) his hair was untied, hanging freely down and 2) he was now faced with a very perplexed-looking Sylvain. One of these was slightly more mortifying than the other.

Unfortunately, Sylvain couldn’t pass up the opportunity to speak once he rediscovered his ability for it.

”Oh, well, look at what the cat dragged out,” he said, and under the dim light the oil lamps cast along the walls Felix saw the grin that pulled Sylvain’s lips upwards. Felix had barely any time to prepare for his nonsense when he already went on, ”A late-night visit to His Highness’ room, huh? Now that’s a surprise, even though... I mean, there were rumours...”

”What rumours?” Felix asked before he could stop himself. Then, grimacing, he retorted, ”Actually, never mind. Anything from your mouth is as good as useless right now.”

The brush of his hair against his own shoulders felt condemning, and Felix tossed it back with an angry roll of his head. Sylvain’s eyes crinkled just so, and Felix’s stomach dropped all the way to his knees.

”I mean,” Sylvain said, voice drawling in the exact way that made Felix _despise_ him, ”you know how young boys like bullying the one they’re infatuated with...”

If it weren’t for the fact that the boar was trying to get some much needed sleep behind the door Felix had just closed, he might’ve screamed. Instead, he only grimaced and gave Sylvain one of his darkest looks, which didn’t deter the other much after their too many years of friendship.

”Go to sleep, Sylvain,” Felix said over the bitter sensation tingling in his throat, the same one he had experienced only a moment ago as he had lain over the boar prince. ”Before I fetch the sword I got in my room.”

”Man, you must be crushing on everyone if you treat all of us all like this,” Sylvain mumbled, but in the silence in the hallway Felix couldn’t miss the words even if he had tried.

The cough came out before Felix could hold it in, after he had already turned his back on Sylvain. This time, it was harder, accompanied by a feeling of something settling into his lungs and filling them, and Felix staggered until he had to put his hand against the wall between his and Dimitri’s doors.

The stone was cold under his sweaty palm, but the taste of blood in his mouth drew in all of Felix’s attention even as Sylvain came to rub at his back and whisper _you okay there, Felix, _which really was a stupid question at this point.

”I’m… fine,” Felix managed to hiss after swallowing back the awful taste. Slowly, he pushed himself back up and wiped his hand on his nightshirt. ”Good night, Sylvain.”

If his voice sounded garbled and choked, Sylvain had the decency to not comment on it as Felix slammed the door shut behind him, face and chest both burning and aching as though he were suffocating still.

Another cough, and a puff of fragile, spit-coated petals sputtered out. Dots of darker red touched them, but wiping his hands and blowing off the candlelight removed them from both his sight and mind.

_This has to be some sort of sick joke by the Goddess herself_, Felix thought as he lay down in his bed and again realized he’d left his hair tie with Dimitri.

Like so many other things, Felix resigned himself to never getting it back.

viii. viscaria.

A ball at a time like this seemed nothing but an awful attempt at luring the students into a false sense of security, in Felix’s mind. How foolish on the archbishop’s part. Still, nothing could stop the festive mood from spreading around like the disease it was. Similarly, Felix’s own brand of ill worsened notably over the weeks preceding the ball.

If his lungs constricted particularly hard whenever someone invited the boar to the roof of the monastery – an infamous spot for love confessions – it was simply a coincidence. An inconvenient, annoying coincidence.

Sylvain hadn’t bothered him much about The Incident, as Sylvain had dubbed it the few times they had discussed it. He did keep a closer eye on him, which – in his self-made isolation – Felix noticed and bristled at whenever Sylvain tried to get _too_ close.

He was a well-meaning fool, but a fool nevertheless. At the very least, Felix conceded, he hadn’t uttered a word about it to Ingrid, who otherwise would be another constant presence around him. The boar had the sense to not bother him, though he too gave Felix wary glances whenever he did something as innocuous as clear his throat.

The thinly veiled concern, Felix decided, was still better than the glazed-eyed look Dimitri had worn after the village incident. It had reminded him – two years ago, what had happened, it hadn’t been just a bad dream nor a hallucination.

Felix couldn’t and shouldn’t forget. The Dimitri that was now was a mere shadow of what once was.

And yet…

Watching from the sidelines didn’t remove the sickly taste of blood and flowers from his mouth nor the scratching of something thorny in his chest.

Watching away didn’t do it either.

But why would it – if Felix was right in convincing himself that the boar and the coughing were unrelated.

He could do nothing but refocus on his training and ignore all else.

It wasn’t avoidance, not really. Or so he told himself.

The professor was – to put it mildly – an oddly willful person despite their seeming lack of emotion, and persuasive on top of that. Or perhaps _manipulative_ was the better word for it, Felix mused as he scoffed at the suffocating cheer around him. After all, they had got him to participate in this charade, and that itself spoke volumes of whatever peculiar brand of charisma they possessed.

Each moment that dragged on made Felix regret coming more, though. The mild alcohol could only numb his aversion to people so much, and it certainly didn’t lessen the wary glances his classmates sent his way. The classical music grated on his ears, made him think of too many events he’d been forced to attend to as a child either at the royal palace in Fhirdiad or at Fraldarius estate. Felix remembered the small hand he used to hold onto, the one that made the masses of people much less agitating, and picked up his glass once more.

This was going to be a long night, he mused as he caught a glimpse of Dimitri and the other house leaders being pulled to the dancefloor. A _very_ long one, he amended when Dimitri’s gaze caught his and, for one moment, a look of utter misery that reflected Felix’s own crossed that face.

Dimitri had once enjoyed dancing.

Why he didn’t anymore – well, that was one of the few things Felix didn’t know about the prince.

For some reason, it bothered him, and so he resolutely turned his eyes away from the boar and the others as the music changed for a new dance.

The ache in his chest didn’t conjure up petals in his mouth this time, but Felix would almost have preferred the distraction.

He couldn’t avoid dancing forever, for it was the professor themself that came to fetch him from his corner, their face contorted just enough for the illusion of a smile to appear on their lips. Felix would have thought the professor was mocking him if he believed them to be capable of such – they were nothing if not painfully straightforward in a strangely passive sort of way.

They were a human of contradictions, and Felix had enough conflicts in his life.

”Care for a dance?” they asked, but they were already holding out their hand. Felix scowled but complied just to be able to say he _had_ danced with someone that night.

”No,” Felix said, ”but it doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice.”

Besides, this way, he could finally stop being annoyed at Sylvain flirting with whoever crossed his path and seeing Dimitri be invited for a dance again and again. Both were bad enough on their own, but the combination of those two only made Felix moodier.

So.

A distraction was welcome, even if it was in the form of the professor’s much too cold hand guiding him to the center of the dancefloor.

As it turned out, however, that wasn’t as much a distraction as Felix had hoped, as he could see Claude dragging the boar back to the dancefloor with him just when Dimitri had begun to retreat from the others requesting his time. The professor was short – short enough for Felix’s eyes to easily glance over their head at the peculiar pair.

The boar looked like he was supposed to be the one leading, and yet it appeared as though he was the one being led by Claude’s movements. Even from Felix’s position, he could see Dimitri’s composure break as his partner said something, and some flustered nonsense seemed to escape the boar as Claude’s mischievous laughter rang loud and true over the music.

Felix’s attention slipped back to his hold on the professor’s waist and hand, and he saw them watching him silently. Judgmentally, he thought, and it made his face burn with a myriad of feelings he preferred to not dissect. Ever.

”For someone that plays aloof as hard as you do,” they said, voice void of emotion, ”you like paying attention to those around you.”

”To find good sparring partners,” Felix bit out, ”I have to.”

If a part of him wanted to lash out at the piercing stare the professor gave him, that didn’t have anything to do with how correct or wrong their statement was. The crowd that surrounded them piqued Felix’s annoyance, twisted it into a tight knot that swelled in his stomach as his skin prickled from too many stares, the distant sound of Dimitri and Claude’s voices drilling into him like a persistent bee’s buzzing.

”If you say so,” the professor said, apparently settling for Felix’s answer.

At least one of them did.

The Goddess Tower was blissfully empty of people, and Felix found himself able to breathe again, although not all of the tension formed throughout the ball left him. But that was alright. No one was around to press his buttons further, not even Sylvain, who was impossibly difficult to get rid of at times.

Especially since The Incident. At the very lesst Sylvain hadn’t told anyone else about it, not even Ingrid, who would have his head for… one reason or another.

The fresh air around the Tower settled Felix’s nerves, as did the silence that was only broken by distant sounds of merriment. Finally able to breathe, the remaining tension slipped away, and Felix wandered around aimlessly.

Of course, such peace couldn’t last – not for him.

The steps that approached him from behind thumped hard against the stone of the Tower’s floor. The rhythm and weight of them was so familiar that Felix grimaced even before a familiar voice called out, ”Felix. I should have known you would grow weary of the festivities.”

Felix conemplated returning to the entrance hall turned to dance hall, but his feet remained stiffly where they were as Dimitri came to stand beside him, far enough for his presence to fade to the background.

As if Felix had ever been able to ignore Dimitri, even though he had tried hard enough this year and the past two.

Still, he didn’t turn to look at the friend he’d once solemnly sworn his life to in the way only kids did in their lack of foresight. ”I danced. I did my part.”

Dimitri’s laugh sounded distant, polite, and it made Felix’s teeth grind together. ”I’m not here to admonish you, Felix. It seems we had the same thought in mind, this time.”

”How wonderful,” he said, sarcasm dripping into his voice like venom.

”Some things don’t change, do they?” Dimitri continued gently, and something in his voice got Felix’s attention. A strange undertone of uncertainty, perhaps from speaking with Felix like this for the first time since The Incident. ”Even though so many others do...”

”Life’s like that,” Felix said, and pushed the memory from over two years ago out of his mind. His lips curled, his distaste towards himself ever bitter. ”People you thought you knew turn out to be something else entirely.”

_Monsters_, he thought, and the tension came back, _or something else entirely._

”Yes,” Dimitri agreed, his voice closer now. The uncertainty in it now contained painful nostalgia that was difficult to listen to. ”I know people like that, as well.”

Felix glanced to the side Dimitri was at. Even though it was getting dark, the oil lamps kept the area lit enough to offer visibility. The light bounced off Dimitri’s blond hair, the bangs a hot mess as usual. His eyes didn’t turn to Felix’s direction – instead, they looked off into the distance, somewhere Felix couldn’t see.

It was the same as it always had been since the Tragedy.

”I thought you used to like dancing,” Felix said instead of anything that truly needed addressing. The same frustrating tango they’d been stuck in for years now. The helplessness of it annoyed Felix just as much as everything else. ”Even if you were horrible at it.”

Dimitri’s gaze turned towards him then, lukewarm surprise colouring his features. ”I’m surprised you remember,” he said. ”That was… a very long time ago.”

Felix could still recall a much younger Dimitri’s hand squeezing his much too hard in his eagerness to lead – he hadn’t minded it, had only laughed and snorted when Dimitri realized his mistake. The bruises had been worth that look of excitement on Dimitri’s face back then.

(Now, though, there only ever were bruises and coughed-up petals from scarred lungs.)

”I used to care about you,” Felix said, chest tight at the admission. It made him look away, a huffed breath escaping him as he crossed his arms. The sudden chill in the air was to blame, he tried to convince himself. ”I remember many things I wish I’d forget.”

”Used to,” Dimitri parroted him, but he didn’t touch the subject further and let silence fall between them once more, not unlike an uncomfortable blanket of ice. That lasted full five minutes before Dimitri spoke again, with a painfully nostalgic tone, ”You’re correct. I used to enjoy it quite a lot. When it wasn’t… stiff like this. When it was just a pair of kids stumbling around and over their legs… or, I suppose I should say, one of them stumbling and the other… not so much.”

Felix kept his mouth firmly shut and arms close to his chest, hands stuffed beneath his arms to keep himself warm. Let the boar talk himself into exhaustion if he so wished.

”Now,” Dimitri said, ”it seems this is all there is to it. Etiquette. People not quite meeting each other’s eyes. It is all so...” A vague sound left the boar prince, and even without looking Felix was sure he knew what gesture the other was making with his hands.

”It reminds me,” Dimitri continued, solemnly as ever, ”of the growing distance between myself and another person.” A short pause, an inhale. ”Well… at least, tonight does.”

_Don’t pretend to be so heartbroken about it,_ Felix thought bitterly, but he wasn’t sure who the thought was directed to. His throat tickled. Felix swallowed in a feeble attempt at dissolving the feeling.

”I wish,” Dimitri continued, quieter but with more feeling, ”I found a way to close that rift. But it is not easy. Not when that person has already drifted so far. Even so, I wish for at least one dance with them, for the sake of memories that are so precious to me.” Felix’s eyes turned to his side again, as if pulled by an invisible force. With a finger pressed to his chin and eyes gazing downward at his feet, Dimitri looked… small, almost, despite being taller and wider than Felix.

”I couldn’t even bring myself to ask for a dance tonight,” Dimitri murmured, gauntlet-covered finger rubbing at his chin incessantly. ”It is quite pathetic, isn’t it, Felix?”

_Pathetic_, Felix thought,_ yes._

But it wasn’t Dimitri that was the pathetic one here, not tonight.

Felix unfolded his arms from his chest and reached his hand out all the while a stubborn frown remained on his face as he waited for Dimitri’s attention to slide back to him. From a distance, cheerful and snobbish dance music echoed.

When Dimitri’s eyes returned to him and his hand, the back of Felix’s throat tingled and tickled, a horrible feeling drumming in his chest like an echo of the past.

The wide-eyed surprise soon changed into something else as Dimitri’s hand descended over the held-up palm, the other going to Felix’s waist as Felix pressed a hand to Dimitri’s much too wide shoulder.

_ You used to be shorter, _he thought. _I used to feel better looking at you._

”Say anything,” he muttered into the space between them, ”and I’ll kill you, boar.”

”I wouldn’t dream of it,” Dimitri said with a short, breathy laugh as he adjusted his grip around Felix’s hand. A thorn-like sensation prickled inside Felix’s chest until he looked away from that face just as their feet began moving to the distant music.

”Gauntlets, really,” Felix said just to break the icy tension in himself. And to ignore the way Dimitri’s gaze slid just slightly to the side, away from Felix’s face. ”Your dance partners must’ve been overjoyed.”

Dimitri’s mouth pursed minutely at his remark, and Felix really ought to stop paying attention to details like that if he wanted to retain his sanity by the end of the school year. Maybe it was a deep-seated masochism that kept him there with Dimitri. Hard to tell. Felix didn’t quite understand himself as well as he pretended to.

”You know how my hands are,” Dimitri said, even quieter than the distant music. ”Not many people like seeing them, not to mention holding them.”

”Do the scars bother them _that_ much?” The question came out before Felix could stop himself, and a grimace twisted his face as a result of trying to reel it back in too late. The rapidly cooling air around the Goddes Tower sent another chill through him, and he wished he had taken something warmer with him.

A memory: _a nine-year-old Dimitri breaking a drinking glass when Sylvain barged into the dining hall unannounced, startling the prince, and Dimitri trying to hold in a howl as shards of glass bit into his palm._

Memory #2: _two months younger Felix holding sobbing Dimitri’s hand and trying to pick out the glass shards before a more competent and qualified person – that being the head maid of the Fraldarius household – came along._

Rinse and repeat. Felix wondered how many times it’d happened over the past two years before he tossed the useless thought aside. How scarred those hands were now, and not just from breaking glasses and training lances again and again–

Felix’s stomach twisted with an ill feeling.

”Yes,” Dimitri said, very far away from him despite his body being so close to Felix’s. His steps were a bit too long for Felix to match, and they both stumbled. Dimitri’s grip on Felix’s hand tightened, but it was his heart that felt like it was being squeezed. ”It… bothers me, too. It’s a bit shameful to admit.”

”Pathetic,” Felix said as he forced them both to stop, and shoved Dimitri’s hands off of him with a sneer on his face. ”You were never like that with me.” A pause, a much too quick breath. ”Take them off.”

Dimitri stared at him dumbly, but at least it was Felix that those eyes saw now. No one else. Some pressure in Felix’s chest went away, but only a little bit. ”Excuse me?”

”You heard me,” Felix said, challenge in his voice like venom.

The hesitation lasted a few seconds longer than it would have in the past, but Dimitri unclasped his gauntlets and slipped his hands free from both the metal and the gloves beneath the silvery glow. They fell unceremoniously against stone, clanking unharmoniously over the sounds from the ball. It was the kind of music they’d been listening to their entire lives, from the moment they’d been taught to wield a weapon.

Dimitri extended his arms out as if expecting Felix to put them where they belonged. ”Here,” he said, as if he were offering a fragile part of himself for Felix to hold – or crush, as Felix was wont to do with him these days.

The hands were more scarred than what Felix remembered – he hadn’t seen them exposed two years ago either, now that he thought about it. The white lines of scars ran across Dimitri’s palms and the backs of his hands, and Felix wondered what in the name of the eternal flames he’d been doing to get so many of them.

”How many glasses have you been breaking?” Felix scoffed. ”You really are a wild animal.”

”Well, some of them are from Mercedes’ attempts at teaching me to sew and other delicate work,” Dimitri explained as Felix took his hands and set one of them back to his waist where it had previously been. ”Last month I nearly cut my thumb off with scissors. I would have if they hadn’t bent, that is.”

That gave Felix a pause. ”How do you – how the–”

Dimitri’s cheeks flushed in embarrassment, and it was painfully reminiscent of a smaller Dimitri with a broken training lance in his hand. ”Believe me when I say I _do not know_.”

Felix’s own hands were bare, so the one that had latched onto Dimitri’s felt the roughness of Dimitri’s skin, the callouses accompanying the scars.

The irony of Dimitri covering this up like he covered everything else did not escape Felix, and a hysterical laugh tickled in the back of his throat, along with other more complicated sensations.

”It’s always me,” Felix said, pausing when his mouth didn’t naturally come up with a finished sentence. The feeling was there, but not the words.

Dimitri’s eyes slid back to his face instead of continuing to look over his shoulder, and Felix was once again reminded of a man drowning in himself. ”It is always you,” Dimitri said, voice brittle like the glass that had scarred his palms, ”and, for that, I… I am sorry.”

For the first time in what felt like forever, Felix realized Dimitri was really looking at _him._

”Spare the apologies for someone that cares,” Felix retorted, huffing in annoyance when Dimitri’s steps became too long for him to follow properly. Stubbornly, he stomped his foot down until Dimitri shortened his step, fingers curling against Felix’s waist.

”Thank you,” Dimitri whispered, and – for a treacherously long moment – his forehead hovered above Felix’s, blue eyes staring into his with a contemplative look to them that had Felix’s heart squirm a little too much. Felix glared up at those eyes in a stubborn refusal to back down.

Dimitri’s expression faltered, and his eyes shifted away during the next step. ”...I ought to go back, I suppose.”

Felix let go of that hand with surprising difficulty, with an ache in his heart he was always covering up with nasty words and anger. The moment was finished, and Dimitri too pulled back, away from Felix and what little body warmth he had offered. Felix watched him put the gloves and the gauntlets back on, each movement mechanical even despite the slight trembling of two scarred hands.

”Hey,” Felix said before he could stop himself. ”Happy belated birthday, boar.”

Dimitri’s shoulders stiffened momentarily before relaxing again. Still, he didn’t turn to look at Felix as he fiddled with his gauntlets with the elegance of an untamed beast. ”Thank you.”

A cough tore its way out of Felix’s throat after Dimitri had gone his way, and it echoed off the stones of the Goddes Tower and through the cold night air. In its wake, light violet pink-bordering petals spluttered out of Felix’s mouth, along with droplets of blood.

_It wasn’t me that he wanted a dance with,_ Felix thought as he glared at the offending petals in his palm, _but it’s what he got._

What a poor replacement he made.

ix. oleander.

Jeralt died a few days after the ball, and the monastery wrapped itself up in the misery that came with death and murder. The professor seemed even more closed-off than usual. Classes weren’t exactly cancelled, but they were fewer, and even the house leader became harder to reach as he spent more and more time away from the dormitory.

Felix didn’t mind the extra time in his hands, but.

The atmosphere prickled into his skin, reminded him too vividly of the long weeks after Glenn’s ”passing” as it had come to be called in the Fraldarius household, and no amount of training drills could drive it away entirely.

So, it was a relief when they were called – when Dimitri gathered them and the professor and told them the knights had located the enemy – and given a plan and a target. _That_ Felix could handle, perhaps more for the professor’s sake and not just his own selfish need’s. The mission was rather unremarkable in retrospect, asides from its results: a professor with glowing light green hair, matching eyes, and an outfit befitting that of a prophet.

It was the month following that battle that was harder, equally hard as the one preceding the mission. Grief wasn’t the only thing present now: exhaustion, people overworking themselves for exams and work alike, the boar’s footwork turning sloppy in training.

If the last part got to Felix the most, no one called him out on it, thankfully, though Sylvain kept on pestering him about the coughing that had only grown worse after the Goddess Tower incident. Equally stubborn, Felix insisted it was nothing, though now he couldn’t fool himself and think the boar had nothing to do with it.

_Unrequited love_, people whispered about the disease that had reared it head across the continent months ago, _is the cause, did you hear?_

Felix ignored the hearsay, but a part of him registered it and tucked it away into the back of his mind for later introspection – if he ever got to the point where he wanted to revisit the thought, if he ever became even more masochistic than what he already was.

What he couldn’t ignore was the steady downward spiral the boar seemed to have got himself into, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to intervene when he was very much supposed to be done caring at this point. After the embarrassment that was the Goddess Tower incident.

(Or he didn’t know how, anymore.)

That said, he didn’t manage to stop himself from growling ”What in the eternal flames is _wrong_ with you?” when Dimitri misstepped and fell after a particlarly sharp jab from Felix’s training sword. Dimitri’s grip on his training sword was as strong as ever, though, and Felix grimaced at the telltale bend in its shape. ”You try to pass _that _off as swordsmanship, boar?”

Dimitri’s eyes didn’t rise to meet his, but his voice cracked when he spoke. ”I’m only tired, Felix. Nothing more to it.”

_Then sleep, _Felix almost retorted, but it wasn’t as though Dedue didn't already do that enough for both of them. On more than one occasion, he had overheard them – Dedue insisting that Dimitri looked pale, and Dimitri grimacing and pushing away the concerned hand on his shoulder – and…

It infuriated him.

That he cared.

To the extent that it hurt himself.

”Pull yourself together, you damn beast,” Felix said and didn’t think of the night when Dimitri’s scarred hand had held his own and how the bridge between them had felt shorter than it had in years.

Dimitri didn’t meet his gaze, but his hand squeezed around the sword's hilt until the weapon bent under the pressure.

It was Felix that left then, just like he had left Dimitri now almost three years ago after that damned battle, blood and petals in his mouth even before the coughing commenced.

How utterly pathetic.

(Felix’s birthday passed in silence: Sylvain and Ingrid got him gifts, as did the professor, but that was the extent of it – and Felix preferred it this way.)

x. monkshood.

And so it all came burning down when the Flame Emperor revealed herself both to the church and the students as Edelgard von Hresvelg. She declared war upon them – not only the church, but the Kingdom and the Alliance as well.

After her mask had been torn off, the boar prince’s own shattered as well – Felix felt ill looking at it, at the personification of rage and inhumanity, and yet he couldn’t get the memory of his words out of his head.

”_I’ll hang your head from the gates of Enbarr!”_ Dimitri had screamed, voice crackling with the same static as years before during the rebellion that had helped Felix realize two things: Dimitri didn’t see _him_, and the part of Dimitri that once did had been burned alive in Duscur.

Vengeance, Felix realized with disgust, was what had kept Dimitri going all this time.

Not the living people, not – not anything that _mattered_, but the past that wouldn’t change no matter what justice was brought to the dead.

Not that Felix was any better, he now realized with a sickening twist to his gut. The implication that the Emperor had been involved with the incident that had stolen Glenn’s life was–

But Felix had more rationality than that.

A 13-year-old brat having _any_ part in that chaos was unlikely at best. And yet…

The sickening feeling twisting his gut soon became all about Dimitri again as he paid attention to the boar wandering around the monastery like a man possessed or a cornered animal. Between the preparations for the Empire’s attack and his own training, there was not much time to concern himself with the boar and that he did find some irked him at least as much as the worry he didn’t know where to direct.

The few times he wandered in the proximity of the boar purely by accident, Felix caught him muttering to himself, voice low and so unlike his usual tone that Felix couldn’t help grimacing. He’d heard it before, and yet. Yet.

”El,” the animal that had crawled straight out of Dimitri’s husk muttered under his breath, ”you’ll pay back for everything you took.”

Always about Edelgard, sometimes with that strange nickname that sounded like it should have been affectionate but which had been twisted into a hateful one.

At the end of it all, the day before the Empire’s army was at the doors of Garreg Mach, Felix realized it.

The person Dimitri had wanted to dance with all along.

_Goddess,_ he thought bitterly as he watched Dimitri leap over rubble to chase his way to Edelgard on the other side, _truly has the most wicked sense of humour._

They won the skirmish, but lost the battle – and with it, the archbishop and the professor.

xi. black roses.

On what would have been their graduation day, all of them were already on their way back home, and some had possibly already arrived in their own territories by the time Felix returned to Fraldarius with the old man, who hadn’t left him to his own devices but who had only fetched him as a side-thought to the boar prince.

”No, Rodrigue,” Felix heard the boar say for the fourth time, with a tired, brittle voice, ”I cannot ask you to accompany me to Fhirdiad when you are much more needed here.”

”Your Highness,” Felix’s old man returned just as tiredly, ”I would never feel at ease again if something were to happen to you on your way back.”

Felix half-expected his father to say something about the long-dead king again, about the old debts that the king wasn’t around to collect. But Rodrigue didn’t, and Felix didn’t know what to make of it. Nor did he know what to make of himself eavesdropping on them like this, feet frozen on the solid floor of the Fraldarius manor as though his constant emotional paralysis had become a physical one.

”I cannot ask you to leave your territory unattended at a time like this,” Dimitri continued insisting in that strained, close-to-snapping tone. ”I have Dedue, as well as the soldiers assigned to me by the church. I am certain we will make it to the capital just fine.”

Even Rodrigue couldn’t keep arguing with Dimitri when he was in a mood like this, and so he sighed and gave stern words to the soldiers and Dedue in regards to keeping the boar prince safe and sound.

Well, the boar was right about that. He did get to capital just fine – but, not a week after his arrival at the capital, the regent king of Faerghus was found dead in his bed chambers. The news spread fast along with the surprisingly quick discovery of the culprit.

Years later, Felix would remember the way the message had been delivered to their dining room, and how Rodrigue had sighed and opened the letter upon hearing the word _urgency_, only for his expression to shift from vaguely worried to frozen horror.

_Well,_ Felix would remember thinking, _here we go._

”His Highness has been arrested,” Rodrigue murmured, ”for the assassination of the Regent.”

The fork Felix had been holding fell unceremoniously, and the loud _clank_ that followed was only a secondary sensation to the rush of blood Felix felt going through him.

From there, the events continued to snowball further until –

Two months later, after Felix had returned home from subjugating yet another band of thieves, his old man told him, cold rage in his voice and eyes looking right past him: ”His Highness has been executed in Fhirdiad.”

Felix didn’t die, not even when he coughed out a bucket full of black petals from his throat in the nights following the announcement. _Unrequited love_, the gossipers had called the illness ailing him, but the term didn’t quite match the situation in his mind.

In the days between the grief that had taken over House Fraldarius, Felix came to learn that it was a deadly disease that had claimed lives of many but which should ease off if the person ailed with it learned to let go of such painful feelings.

_Moving on_ , people had said, _is the best cure for such heartache._

If only someone like him, who had only ever been running away from his problems rather than confronting them despite his confrontational nature, knew how to do so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did you know fungus stands for "resilience", "loneliness", "solitude" and "disgust"?


	2. Chapter 2

xii. forget-me-nots.

No one ever saw Dimitri’s execution. Somewhere along the weeks and months of the Kingdom cracking and her lords betraying one another for the sake of power and survival, this fact stood out to both Felix and his old man, though Felix was reluctant to go so far as declare Dimitri alive based off on conjecture like that.

Because Felix was Felix, he kept himself busy with the bandits while his father gathered the eastern lords that had yet to swear fealty to the self-declared ruler of Faerghus.

Felix didn’t like watching his father delude himself into the firm faith of Dimitri being alive any more than he liked that in the depths of his heart he was starting to believe in it, too. It was logic, really: Cornelia had always, from what he had seen of her, struck him as a particularly ruthless person toward her enemies, despite the sugary smile she wore around the crown prince and his friends.

But.

If he allowed himself the hope…

_Move on,_ strangers’ voices whispered in his head. _Move on, and be done with it._

But that was just the thing, wasn’t it?

Felix had never really moved on: not from Glenn, not from the soft-hearted boy he had once begged to stay longer with.

The pain in his lungs and the blood in his mouth, although rarer now, never let him forget that.

xiii. wormwood.

In the end, he and Sylvain departed to do what the heads of their houses could not. Despite his careless front and smiles more forced than Felix’s hatred of Dimitri, Sylvain was more loyal than anyone would credit him for based on the shitty way he treated women of any kind.

Felix knew this. And he was grateful for the company, even if Sylvain made it a real challenge sometimes.

”Ingrid won’t be coming,” Sylvain told him early on. ”Galatea’s trying to stay neutral in this mess.”

”Makes sense,” Felix said. He had already accepted that the whole ordeal would force Ingrid into complacency for the sake of duty – it had always tortured her, that duty, but she could never run from it. _Like Glenn_, Felix thought bitterly and wondered if that was where Ingrid had got it from too.

”It’s just you and me,” Sylvain said.

”The boar better not be dead or else I’ll kill him for leaving me with you,” Felix returned with no more than the usual amount of venom.

”Wow,” Sylvain chuckled. ”Glad to see _you’re_ the same as ever, Felix.”

_What the hell does THAT mean, _Felix wanted to ask but instead pursed his lips and unfurled a map to point out the route to their first destination.

Felix travelled with Sylvain for weeks and months on end, and it was the most time he had possibly ever managed to stand to be around another person since Glenn’s death. Even though their objective was to find Dimitri, or at least information on what happened to him, Sylvain didn’t bring him up after the first few times, which Felix had shot down with the fervour of a wounded animal.

Their first destination was Fhirdiad – or rather, the areas surrounding the capital, as the city itself posed too much a threat to enter it as Cornelia had, according to rumours, tightened the security considerably. Executions had become weekly, if not even daily on harsher weeks.

”I don’t like this,” Sylvain said more than once, jaw clenched tightly as he rode on by the side of Felix’s horse. ”As if the situation wasn’t bad enough as it was before.”

Silently, Felix agreed.

Even if he didn’t have any lingering attachments to the boar, finding him would be imperative nevertheless.

Many rumours ran abound regarding Dimitri’s execution. The most popular one was that it had been botched and committed too early by Cornelia’s staff – this made Felix scoff and refute it even before he could fully consider it. Another popular one was that he’d died when people from Duscur had attacked the castle.

Sylvain had pursed his lips and closed his eyes at that particular one, but the truth was that Dedue’s people _had_ been witnessed around the castle didn’t leave the rumour without some merit. But, again, it wasn’t as though Felix and Sylvain were speaking to the eyewitnesses themselves.

The third rumour was, and it was the one that gave people the most hope, that Dimitri had staged a prison escape and ran away from Fhirdiad before his actual execution would have taken place.

Felix remembered Dimitri’s tight-lipped expression and the dimness in his eyes the last time he’d seen him.

Would that Dimitri have had enough will left to find a way?

The question bothered him unreasonably much, and he became snappier with Sylvain as a result – although Felix regretted the flash of pain some remark sent through Sylvain’s face, he couldn’t find it in himself to apologize. Not until much later.

Felix had always been somewhat of an insomniac, but it had got significantly worse after Glenn’s physical and Dimitri’s spiritual deaths. That was why he always took the first watch on the nights he and Sylvain were forced to sleep outside the comforts of an inn. He had spent too many hours of his life trying to fall asleep and overthinking when he could and should have been doing something more productive, like training or weapon maintenance.

Sleeping had been easier as a child, and even easier by Dimitri’s side when they’d held hands and shared kisses they’d seen their parents exchange.

But in exchange for sleep, at the very least Felix could say he didn’t have as many nightmares as he used to have as a child. The few nightmares he had now were vastly different, and infinitely worse, but they were infrequent, easier to get over than the recurring nightmares that had kept Dimitri screaming in the dorm room adjacent to his.

On one such night, with the night sky filled with stars spreading over them like a spotted canvas, Felix remembered the time when there’d only been a wall between their bodies – their spirits or souls were a different thing, though Felix scoffed just thinking of such vague concepts.

This was stupid. Dimitri was dead. The wall between them had become a permanent one, now. And yet, the thought of it scared Felix more than any of his past nightmares, save for the one he’d had once Glenn’s death had properly sunk in.

In it, it was Dimitri that had died a miserable death, swallowed by the very flames Dimitri had once vaguely described to Felix.

Felix had woken from it so shaken he had spent the next twenty minutes looking for Dimitri, who had returned to Fhirdiad the day before, before one of the maids caught him and went to fetch him warm milk.

But now…

Felix pursed his lips as he glared into the flames of the fire Sylvain had helped him set up hours ago. _What am I doing, Glenn,_ he wanted to ask despite knowing it to be fruitless. No ghost had ever answered him: not Glenn, not his mother, not Dimitri.

Sylvain finally called him out on it one night when Felix had woken from one such nightmare coughing up petals whose colours were indistinguishable in the dark.

”I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while now,” Sylvain said by the fire’s side, and if Felix turned his head, he would see his old friend’s gaze rest heavily upon his shaking form. ”Felix… you’re sick, aren’t you?”

Felix spat out some more petals before he managed to croak, ”I’m n-not.”

It would have been more convincing if his voice hadn’t cracked, he was ready to admit that much.

Sylvain sighed. ”I’ve known you for how many years now? I’ve been waiting for you to open up, but clearly that’s as hopeless as you and Ingrid make me out to be.”

Felix’s hands clutched at the piece of fabric masquerading as a blanket. ”It’s a useless effort,” he snorted in a rare show of self-deprecation. His nails dug deeper into the fabric. ”Stop worrying, fool.”

He could say _it’s not as bad as it was at the Academy, _but that would be admitting far too much to Sylvain, who already saw through him well enough – which was _too_ well, in Felix’s opinion. No one else had to be involved in the convoluted thing that was him, Dimitri, and feelings that ought to be cut off but weren’t.

”You say that,” Sylvain said softly, ”like it’s such an easy thing to do.”

The irony of the situation didn’t escape Felix – this was the exact debate he had had over Dimitri during the academy year – and he laughed bitterly at the realization. ”You’re starting to sound like someone else I know.”

”You really should listen sometimes, you know.”

”Good night, Sylvain,” Felix said decisively, and turned away from the fire.

They did occasionally return to their respective territories, especially when the skirmishes between the eastern and western lords threatened to grow worse. The Dukedom, as Cornelia’s reign was now called, wanted unification, and it wanted it before the Empire could burn it all to the ground.

Felix was grateful for these breaks from Sylvain’s company and the entirely too knowing stare he gave whenever Felix so much as sneezed in the Kingdom winter. He didn’t bring the illness up again, as it didn’t act up much unless Felix spent copious amount of time reflecting on Dimitri and the past.

Which he didn’t.

Only when he doubted whether Dimitri was even alive. Only when he thought that maybe it _was_ for the best if Dimitri had died in the capital to some rusty executioner’s axe.

Alright, perhaps it was more often than he’d like to admit, but it was still infrequent enough to quell Sylvain’s concerns for most part.

In any case, Felix returned to Fraldarius territory for weeks at a time, assisting the old man however he could despite their differing mindsets, and for a while he had a routine formed by wartime and bandits and everything non-Dimitri related. Things weren’t alright, but they weren’t as bad as they could have been – and that was the best Felix could say about his life since Glenn’s death.

At one point, he wandered off to Galatea territory under the pretense that he wasn’t there to check up on Count Galatea’s situation in regards to joining the eastern lords in their resistance against the Empire and, in particular, Cornelia. Felix doubted his father actually thought the count had changed his mind; more likely, Felix thought sourly, it was a badly veiled attempt at giving him a break from the war effort.

Not that he minded the chance to check up on Ingrid. She was a good change of pace from Sylvain and the old man.

(He was a little worried too, though he refused to think too hard about his own feelings these days.)

Felix arranged to meet with Ingrid at the Galatea manor that had always looked like it was in need of repair but now more so than ever. Ingrid, when she received him in her father’s absence, looked just as hollow as the house, her face a little too pallid and her smile just a touch forced.

”Don’t do that,” Felix said to her immediately, not bothering with either formalities or niceties. ”I didn’t come here for the same old fake smiles I always see at those useless balls and such.”

”You never change, do you, Felix?” Ingrid asked, voice and eyes tight, but she did drop the smile for him. ”Very well. I can’t say I’m in the mood to pretend, either way.”

In all honesty, Felix didn’t know what to say, so when she asked him to, he followed her to the stables in silence. Hands stuffed in his trousers and eyes set on Ingrid’s tensely set shoulders, Felix found matching his steps to her much easier than he had found matching Dimitri’s on the night of the ball.

He shook the nonsensical thought right off his head by the time they arrived at the stables, coming to a halt when Ingrid went to groom her horse. Felix no longer remembered her name, but he could recall her as a filly when she had got nervous from something Sylvain and he did and stomped on Felix’s foot.

Ingrid had scolded _both _of them, although Felix still maintained Sylvain had been the one at fault for unnerving the damn thing.

Dimitri had laughed and held his hand when Felix had grumbled about it later, and the memory of it startled Felix now as he stood there watching Ingrid care for her horse as she always had.

”The old man asked to check on whether the Count’s decision had changed,” Felix said when the silence had gone on for long enough to make him antsy. With nothing to do with his hands, he got restless fast. Ingrid slowly fed a pathetic-looking carrot to her horse without turning towards Felix. ”Guess I should take it things have been getting rougher here, too.”

”In some ways,” Ingrid said. Her voice was low, exhausted. ”The last harvest was bad. The next could be worse. Father is...” She sighed, jaw visibly clenching as she braced herself. ”He’s desperately looking for another marriage candidate as we speak.”

_Go find a husband._ His own words from over two years ago rang through his head, and Felix grimaced. He was spared the obligation of answering when Ingrid let out another sigh, this one making his shoulders sink along with her head in a moment of utter exhaustion. ”I wish His Higness were still alive. Perhaps then, things wouldn’t be so...”

”He’s not dead.” Felix surprised even himself by how heated his words were, how ardent the inflection behind them was. That surprise soon faded into indignation when Ingrid’s spring green eyes looked at him pityingly, similar to how someone would look at a cat standing beside its owner’s corpse. Felix’s brow twitched. ”What’s with that look?”

”I’m not sure how to say this,” Ingrid said, pressing her lips together as she studied him, her face scrunching the longer she did so. Her hands stayed at her sides, but her fingers twitched restlessly. ”I understand how you feel, Felix. I’m sure Sylvain does, as well, when he’s not playing stupid.”

”Stop right there,” Felix groaned. ”We’re not – we’re not doing this.”

”I know how… how hard it is to accept when someone so dear to you passes, but–”

”Ingrid,” Felix said, emphatically. Ingrid’s horse continued eating peacefully. Her name, Felix suddenly remembered, was Marshmallow, as suggested by Sylvain. It had been one of the few suggestions Ingrid had ever accepted from him. Felix forced his face into a scowl. ”Stop talking to me like I don’t know how to accept reality.”

”Do you, Felix?” Ingrid asked, and her arms went crossed over her chest as she gave him her best concerned-but-annoyed face. She would make a good mother one day, Sylvain had always joked and Felix had silently agreed even as Ingrid beat the nonsense out of Sylvain at the training grounds. ”You never talk about these things. You never have, and perhaps you never will, but I know you feel deeper than what you let on.”

”Right now, what I feel is _irritation_,” Felix retorted, his fingers rubbing at the hilt of his sword. ”The more I learn about Cornelia’s true character, the less likely it becomes that she wouldn’t have made Dimitri’s… the _boar’s_ execution into a spectacle, that’s all.”

The slip mid-sentence made Felix wish to slap himself, especially when Ingrid’s eyes softened at it, and the quick change to the familiar insult didn’t change what had already been said. ”Don’t say it,” he warned Ingrid regardless. Something vague tickled in his windpipe, and he sighed at himself. ”I got enough from Sylvain.”

”Pointless teasing and harassment, I assume,” Ingrid said, with heaviness that didn’t match the intended lightness of the words. The two years since Officers Acadamy had been hard on her, though that wasn’t a remarkable phenomenon in a time when everyone had it rough. Still, Felix couldn’t stand the exhaustion on her face and the knowledge that she probably was going hungry with her father now.

_You feel deeper than you let on,_ huh?

”Felix,” she said again, and her fingers curled into her elbows. Her gaze lowered, not meeting his anymore and Felix felt stupidly relieved. ”If you’re right… what do you suppose happened to him?”

”I imagine he’s–” Felix’s mind blanked out on the answer. His brows wrinkled as he tongue didn’t find the words to respond to the question. ”Huh.”

Ingrid’s eyes looked sadder then, reminiscent of the way she had appeared the few times he’d seen her immediately after Glenn’s death.

”It’s alright, Felix,” she said, and he didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean and didn’t have time to wonder when she had already gone in for a tight hug that had Felix freeze on the spot.

He couldn’t bring himself to shake her off, not when he felt her trembling and felt her fingers clawing through the back of his coat.

Slowly, he returned it – in silence, as usual, with his eyes directed to the clouds looming above them like a bad omen.

_What do you suppose happened to him_, Ingrid had asked, and the question clung to Felix’s subconscious like a damned leech long after he left Galatea territory. The restlessness that question caused in him was as perturbing as his sudden faith in Dimitri being actually alive. Or, Felix supposed wearily, perhaps it wasn’t surprising – rather, it was expected, as Felix had never been good at letting go.

As a child, he had whined and thrown tantrums at the times he could’ve spent with Dimitri but wasn’t allowed to. He’d gone complaining to Sylvain, who had laughed at him before patting his head in the brotherly way Glenn sometimes did.

Then, later, he hadn’t been good at letting Glenn go either – but that was the result of his environment, wasn’t it, with the way his father and Dimitri had looked at him like he was the damned ghost of the dead but proud knight. Even now, on his way to Gautier to pick Sylvain up, Felix still felt that ghost hover over him.

As a teenager, as a seventeen-year-old boy that pretended nothing else but the pursuit of strength mattered, he hadn’t been able to toss those burdens away. Toss Dimitri away. His own inability had infuriated him, and more and more petals had sputtered past his lips the longer the academy year went.

Ingrid was the economical one out of the four childhood friends, never Felix.

So.

The question persisted.

_Where in the hell are you, Dimitri?_

Two years turned into three. Felix lungs burned more from battle than from illness. Bandits – Dukedom forces – all the same, Felix fought between the long stretches of searching. Sleeping didn’t become easier, but it wasn’t any more difficult than it had been during the academy when he’d worked himself into exhaustion at training grounds before forcing himself to bed and catching four or five hours of rest before the morning came and bells rang all across the monastery.

Sylvain’s hair grew somewhere along the way. He still got into trouble with women more often than not when Felix wasn’t looking.

Sometimes they met with Ingrid and pretended everything was fine with just the three of them. That three was just as fine a number as four had been.

It all became mechanic, habitual, and the only sign of Felix’s persisting illness were the times he woke up from an infrequent nightmare with his mouth full of flower petals and the taste of blood. _Moving on_ was supposedly the cure, and yet – yet Felix felt he was the furthest thing from moving on, even as memories of Dimitri became more hazed with each month and half a year that passed by.

_Guess it’s the distance that does it,_ Felix thought and recognized the irony in that perhaps he had been on the right path all along but his inability to keep ignoring Dimitri at the academy had done him in. If he'd had ignored him just a little more, he wouldn't be suffering the consequences now - wouldn't have become ill in the first place.

What a cursed thing it was, to share a bond so deep with someone that neither one could cut it despite their best efforts.

Three years turned into four, and then some months.

Millennium festival should have been in sight, if things had gone according to the plan. Sylvain coaxed Felix into travelling to Garreg Mach – ”Come on, Felix, you _can’t_ say you don’t want to see how everyone’s doing!” – and Felix agreed to it because secretly he was indeed as soft as his childhood friends made him out to be.

What he didn’t know was just how much things would change at the class reunion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me before this fic: so im going to write sappy fraldarddyd  
this fic: no


	3. Chapter 3

xiv. white chrysanthetum.

At first, Felix failed to recognize him. Which was, in retrospect, hilarious and ironic, because most of the others seemed to catch on pretty fast as to who the husk of a man before them was. Perhaps it was because others were preoccupied by the sight of their long-lost professor beside the beastly thing, their hand gently pressed over black as night armour and their voice calling the beast ”Dimitri”.

Back in the academy days, everyone had taken Dimitri at face value. Felix had felt sick just watching it. He had known better. Dimitri had known he knew. And yet Felix hadn’t thought – hadn’t thought that the perfect prince masquerade would end one day.

Stupid – _stupid_. He hadn't wanted _this_.

Now the boar’s hair lay limply around his face, uncombed and unwashed for who knew how long. An eyepatch covered one eye, and the remaining one was so cold and lifeless calling him a corpse would only be accurate instead of insulting.

Five years of searching and for what? To find a corpse masquerading as –

No, that wasn’t right. The corpse wasn’t masquerading anymore. What had been peeled away was the mask itself, and Felix found it difficult to watch despite having seen it in Dimitri all those years ago.

But the corpse’s body had grown – if he’d been wide before, he seemed doubly so _now_, and the five centimetres of height difference had stretched into well over ten, if Felix estimated correctly. He _loomed_ over most of them now, even Sylvain, who actually wasn’t noticeably shorter than the thing before them but their presences had become vastly different.

Even so, majority of the attention seemed to be directed to the professor and their unchanged appearance – and while, yes, Felix agreed that earned some attention, he felt inclined to point at what had once been Dimitri and say _that demands a bit more attention, don’t you think_. But he didn’t do that: instead, he stood frozen in his own shock and irritation, with an old feeling in his chest he hadn’t wished to experience again.

He had searched for Dimitri for nearly five years – or even longer than that, really, perhaps ever since the Tragedy took so much from both of them.

But now that he was before Dimitri(’s remains) again, he didn’t know what to do.

An old helplessness resurfaced, and Felix hated it more bitterly than he had ever hated what Dimitri had become.

_What the hell happened to you_, he wondered as he watched the corpse retreat from people that had once considered him a friend. He’d get his answer soon enough, once they officially returned to the monastery.

”Dedue’s dead,” the beast answered to a question from one of them – Annette, perhaps, Felix hadn’t paid attention to anything but the tension crawling through the beast’s form and the way the those fingers sunk into the metal of his spear. ”He died to save me, and yet it was all worthless in the end.”

The laugh that escaped the beast then rang hollow, maniacal and empty, and Felix turned to look down at his own clenched hands and the hilt of the sword at his side. The sound of the monster’s voice sent a crawling feeling down his spine, as though dozens of spiders were climbing it down. ”None of you should’ve come for a worthless promise. Not for a boy that no longer exists.”

Felix looked up then. Dimitri’s face had changed, something painful right under the surface of anger and exhaustion. Against the ruins of the monastery, the beastly misery was almost fitting. The droplets of dried blood on the sickly pale skin looked dark, glaringly so to Felix’s eyes.

It was as though death itself had sunk into his bones and made its home within what had once been Dimitri, and Felix felt either bile or blood rise into his mouth the longer he kept watching him. Eventually, the beast spared him the effort and turned away to leave with staggering steps that echoed off the walls that remained.

”You were right, Felix,” Ingrid said to him that night in the dining hall that had only suffered from a severe case of dust infection over the years. ”He was alive.”

The meat must’ve been spoiled, because it tasted awful on Felix’s tongue. ”If that thing can be counted among the living,” he muttered, staring down at his plate and thinking about how the boar used to (politely) shovel his own food there just to finish the meal faster. ”Looks like a corpse to me.”

Dimitri had moved himself to the cathedral and hadn’t shown his face since. Goddess only knew what he was doing. Felix didn’t want to think about it.

Gilbert, Gustave, whatever his name was, had brought up the disturbing rumours about the suddenly lost and killed Imperial troops from months and years back. Somehow, Felix had never heard of them, and that made his stomach twist just as much as the rumours themselves. _So that’s what he’d been up to, when I was busy looking for his sorry self, _Felix thought as he glared down at his meager meal, _from all the wrong places._

It didn’t surprise him, not with the last memories of Dimitri he had. Not when he knew of the boar’s twisted nature, the violence that bubbled right beneath the surface, just waiting for the right trigger.

Was that all there was left now?

Felix couldn’t finish the meal, despite Ingrid’s disapproving stare when he got up to leave.

He had places to be at.

The cathedral had never been Felix’s first choice for a place to spend excessive amount of time at, and even now the atmosphere gave him chills. The half-collapsed pillars and roof gave way to rubble, a pile of which the boar stood before at. He didn’t seem to be doing much, only staring upwards somewhere Felix couldn’t see.

The same as usual, then.

Felix’s throat went dry, but he didn’t tear his gaze away.

Self-torture had never been his favourite pastime, and yet he always fell straight into the habit of it. (Always for _his_ sake, because at heart Felix was still that stupidly loyal brat despite growing out of the ideals of knighthood and chivalry.)

From this distance and through the cathedral’s heavy silence, he heard the beast’s mumbles, the rising and faltering voice that would have broken any decent person’s heart.

But Felix’s heart hadn’t been whole to begin with, so a few more cracks on it didn’t make much of a difference. So he kept on watching, a numb feeling in his chest and a wondering thought of whether he and the old man really ought to have accompanied Dimitri back to Fhirdiad almost five years ago.

Before realizing it, Felix had taken a step forward – away from the pillars, towards the sorry excuse of a man – that then became two, three, four until Dimitri’s sighs became intelligible.

”Just wait for a little while,” he begged, voice strained and gauntlet-covered hands in his hair, ”father, Glenn. Not much longer… I promise, her death will come. You’ll have her head. Her blood.”

Felix’s steps faltered, his heart stuttered like somebody had punched it. Even his old man had finally begun to mention Glenn less and less over the years, but.

There it was, once again. Back at the academy, occasionally a distinct but muffled scream from Dimitri’s room would become audible in the middle of the night. When Felix had paid attention, he’d make out Glenn’s name. So he quickly stopped paying attention to the details, and likewise, Dimitri stopped going to sleep before him as the months trickled on like sand through an hourglass. Though there had been… one exception that Felix still recalled with shame. The taste of Dimitri's mouth on his had long since faded, but the memory of the act still haunted him like a best friend intent on embarrassing him.

Either way, Felix didn’t think he could turn a blind eye to this so effectively, and that made him clench his jaw until it ached.

And yet – yet he found that he didn’t have the strength to deal with this right now, that he’d much rather deal with Dimitri like he’d dealt in the past and avoid him until Dimitri’s problems would, hopefully, go away without his interference. They never did, regardless of Felix’s actions or lack thereof.

But he stayed regardless, standing rooted on the spot and watching the beast and its wide back in utter silence, with a heart so heavy it could be falling through the stone floor under his feet and a taste so acidic on his lips that Felix felt like vomiting. And if that wasn’t the most fitting description of their relationship, Felix at least couldn’t think of a better one.

xv. geranium.

Etheral Moon 25th, 1185. The millennium festival should have been in full swing then, but the date also marked five days since Dimitri’s 23rd birthday. One day since the former Blue Lion House had reunited with one another. Weeks since Felix had departed from Fraldarius territory once more, this time only for a half-hearted search while Sylvain and he made their way toward Garreg Mach.

Felix stood in the cathedral and watched passively as Sylvain made his way to the creature, his step too carefree in the somber atmosphere. Felix had half the mind to stop him, but perhaps this one time Sylvain would learn from his mistake on the first try. Not that Felix counted on even that _thing_ to stop Sylvain from horrible self-management.

In the overwhelming silence around the cathedral, Sylvain’s voice was as loud as the front lines of a war. ”Hey there, Your Highness,” he said, and Felix grimaced when he saw Sylvain’s hand reach down to the beast’s shoulder. At the very least Sylvain had the sense to not approach the beast from its blindspot – Dimitri merely raised a hand to slap Sylvain’s away with a harsh flick of his wrist.

”What do _you_ want.” The disdain in Dimitri’s voice had even Sylvain flinch visibly, but – unfortunately – he didn’t give up on the beast like he should have.

With an easygoing tone and the usual mask of carefree indifference, Sylvain said, with a short laugh, ”Just wanted to say, happy belated birthday, Your Highness. Your birthday was some days ago, wasn’t it? You’re twenty-three entire years old now, buddy. Something worth celebrating. We even have some of that infamous Gautier Cheese Gratin you used to like so much–”

”Birthday?” Dimitri repeated, and the hollowness of his voice contrasted Sylvain’s so much that Felix’s grimace deepened. ”Corpses have no need for those.”

”Well,” Sylvain said after a beat of silence. ”At least your corpse needs to feed itself, Your Highness. Come on, the cheese ain’t eating itself.”

”_Go away_,” the corpse growled, and Felix didn’t need to see the expression on Dimitri’s face for his stomach to twist all over with a deep sense of disturbance, familiar from all those years ago when he’d first become aware of that Dimitri had more faces than one.

”Go away,” the corpse repeated, voice turning hollow again. But the underlying rage didn’t go away, and Felix heard it as clearly as he used to hear the church bells ring through the monastery each morning.

Felix wondered which the beast hated more now: the Empire, or himself.

(”You’re a damned fool,” Felix said to Sylvain later on their way to the dining hall. ”You were asking for trouble just now.”

Sylvain shrugged, as careless with his own life and wellbeing as usual. ”The Gautier Cheese Gratin was worth a try,” he said. ”You never know what kinda thing will pull Dimitri back from whatever abyss he’s in right now.”

Felix shoved the hilt of his sword to Sylvain’s side mercilessly until his old and idiotic friend made a satisfying _oof_ sound. ”Reckless idiot,” he said, his voice not containing as much seething as it did exhaustion. ”You thought cheese would fix that… that thing.”

”It usually does with girls,” Sylvain said, and Felix seriously considered plunging the tip of his sword through his friend’s foot.)

xvi. red carnation.

The aftermath of their first battle as a somewhat organized army was… to put it bluntly, unsettling, and even Felix felt tight beneath his skin, highstrung and restless after what he’d seen the beast do and heard it _say_.

_Monster_, it called itself now, and it wasn’t wrong.

Felix thought: _it really would have been better if you had died back then._

At least that way, Felix wouldn’t keep losing him. Death should be done at once, instead of whatever torture this was.

But even so, the words didn’t come past his lips, some stubborn part of him refusing to utter a thought like that aloud. Even now, that _stupid_, child-like part of him wanted to find a shard of the old Dimitri to hold onto, to pull back from the pit he’d fallen into, to hold until the beast would leave both of them be –

It was utterly pathetic how desperate he was for even for that scrap of a person Dimitri had been at the academy. Utterly pathetic how Felix now looked at the beast retreating from the battlefield and away from their professor and even so felt the thorns of an unconfessed love pressing brittle in his lungs. Even when he could clearly see the blood sticking to the furs the beast had coated himself with, Felix’s heart could only ache and bleed from painful love, not the hatred he had tried to cover himself with.

Always running away while still staying in the same place – that was him, that was _them_, although Dimitri had never ran away. Instead, he had let himself be trapped in the jaws of a past too hungry for blood. Had those jaws snapped shut around him for good, now?

No, Felix decided.

But he didn’t have the strength to pull him out of there.

”Again,” Felix said empathetically to the professor that had been stupid enough to think some tea would calm him down, ”do something about that thing, professor. Before it hurts us all.”

Felix’s insomnia hadn’t got better over the years, so he found himself wandering to the cathedral that night by himself once again. The guards didn’t pay him much mind after they realized where he was headed off to – no one dared to disturb the beast’s nest, he figured. Out of sight, out of mind, they probably thought of Dimitri. While Felix had operated much the same only five years prior, the idea still made his lips curl in annoyance as he hurried his steps, ignoring the cold northern wind that seemed to do the impossible and seep through the thick fur of his clothes.

On the bridge, the wind was worse, and Felix buried his hands under his arms, a scowl on his face as he nodded to the guards that let him in. The cold didn’t let up inside the cathedral, but at least the wind didn’t get in. Felix let his hands fall back to his sides as he entered the inside of the cathedral, where between the rows of benches and before the large pile of rubble sat the thing Felix was there for.

This wasn’t the first night Felix had come to check up on the boar – not the first time since reunion, and certainly not the first time in general. Even after their relationship had fallen into nothing more than shattered pieces of a shared past, Felix had –

Well, it didn’t matter. Felix hadn’t done enough, hadn’t _been_ enough, and the boar was what he had always been since the tragedy.

But there was no fixing what the five years of absence had done. Not without time, which none of them had, and not without patience, which Felix had a very limited amount. _Goddess,_ he thought as he approached Dimitri from behind, _ where’s that lapdog when you need him._

Dead, apparently. Felix didn’t like the thought, and he couldn’t grasp why. The blind obedience had been sickening.

(It had been almost nice to see someone else notice the little things off about Dimitri when no one else seemed to pay close enough attention – even if Dedue and Felix treated the matter with the two extremes of a solution.)

Felix didn’t bother keeping his steps silent, mostly to avoid startling the beast. Dimitri didn’t react to his presence in anyway, attention elsewhere but he wasn’t talking to his ghosts either. Felix’s brows furrowed as he tried to decide if this was good or not, until the slight shifting of Dimitri’s shoulders caught his attention. Along with slow, heavy breaths that came out forced and shallow.

”What in the flames are you doing?” Felix peered down past Dimitri’s shoulders, and the moonlight helped him direct his gaze to the black gauntlets that had been tossed to the floor. In this light, the bloodstains on them were difficult to make out, so Felix didn’t bother checking for those and let his gaze drop to what the beast was doing with his hands.

He hadn’t noticed Felix’s presence yet, or else he’d have growled at him or let out some other fitting noise, so Felix got a pretty clear view of Dimitri wringing his hands and fingers, the scars scattered on them deep and visible under the pale moonlight. Or, instead of wringing, it was _scratching_: Dimitri’s nails dug into the back of his other hand, like claws, and scratched at the skin hard, the movement strangely absent-minded yet frantic at the same time.

The thing was – normal humans could make themselves bleed like that as well, but they didn’t have the unfortunate side effects of a Crest that granted abnormal levels of strength. Dimitri’s skin had broken under the nail doing the scratching a while back already, and the dark colour of blood trickled down the victimized hand and tainted the tips responsible for the harm.

The sight of it made Felix nauseous, but not as nauseous as the look on the beast’s face he caught a glimpse of when he circled around to the front of the man just sitting on the cathedral floor. The same dead-eyed look Felix had seen before, but now several times darker with the bags under his one visible eye.

It was as though there truly was no one inhabiting that body anymore, not one scrap of the human Felix had once known and adored with the fervour of a child.

Felix crouched before he could think anything more and closed his hands around Dimitri’s wrists. He tugged _hard_, grimacing when blood stained him, until Dimitri’s nails no longer dug into the broken skin of his other hand. But the blood still trickled down, and Felix felt it wet his own glove-covered hand. The sensation itself wasn’t anything new, so Felix stopped paying attention to it.

It was only then that Dimitri’s – the beast’s, the boar’s – attention slid to him, neck shifting awkwardly until one eye glared at him from beneath dirty bangs of hair. ”You,” he said, voice hoarse and uneven, much scratchier than before. ”What do you think you’re doing?”

”What do you think _you’re_ doing?” Felix shot back with a snarl. ”Wasn’t today’s blood enough for you, you damn beast?”

Dimitri stared at him like he was the idiot in the situation. ”It keeps me awake,” he said like Felix should have known that much. Perhaps because Dimitri’s body was at its limits from exhaustion, his voice sounded smaller than Felix had thought it capable of. ”It keeps the dreams away.”

”No, it doesn’t,” Felix said, bile in his throat as his fingers curled tighter around Dimitri’s wrists. On one of them, his fingers brushed over something that was neither skin nor fabric, but Felix’s focus was on the face he hovered over. ”Do you think I don’t know why you refused to let some wounds be healed back at the Academy? I’m neither blind nor deaf, boar.”

It was always the hand wounds that Dimitri kept hidden from Mercedes and professor Manuela. Felix had, even without wanting to, noticed the way Dimitri’s hands would go behind his back to hide themselves whenever Mercedes did her post-battle survey of her classmates’ injuries. Asides from whatever stupid self-consciousness Dimitri harboured about his hands, Felix knew he had intentionally preserved those wounds, only to pick them open later.

Well. Felix didn’t have _proof_, but the conclusion was logical.

The night at the Goddess Tower five years ago had somewhat confirmed it.

(Felix’s way to deal with heartache was to train until his muscles ached and his mind turned numb to stupid thoughts – in a way, his method contained much same with Dimitri’s, though it was less dramatic and a little less physically harmful.)

”Did it help then, boar?” Felix spat the words out just to cover up his own weakness. His nails dug into Dimitri’s skin, very far from drawing blood. Felix wasn’t a gentle person, and he wasn’t being gentle now – despite what it might look like to an outsider peering in. ”Did it help with the nightmares?”

He had expected violence, for the boar to shove him off, but Dimitri only looked at him with his blank, unseeing stare, lips downcurled. Felix didn’t dare to think that perhaps subconsciously Dimitri still trusted him to do no harm, not when the far more likely reason was that the boar thought him as the ghost of a long-dead person.

”Nothing helped with them,” the boar said, grunting as he shifted on the floor, almost squirming but settling down soon after. Then, in a darker tone, the thing continued, ”But it helped me feel alive. The pain did, that is.”

Felix’s skin felt much too tight around him, like it might burst at the invisible seams at any moment. He ground his teeth together, jaw clenched so hard he could feel it in his gums.

”But not anymore,” Felix said, voice flat despite the feelings coiling in him like a venomous snake.

”A walking corpse is just that,” the boar said. As tired as he was angry. Moonlight spilled on his face and highlighted the chapped lips as they moved. ”A corpse.”

”Goddess be damned,” Felix hissed, ”are you even listening to yourself?”

The boar’s eye slid shut, a trembling exhale following. ”It makes them quiet for a while,” he said, ”if you must know.” Another sigh, and his voice gained a manic edge to it as he continued. ”Glenn… father… stepmother. None of them keep quiet if I don’t – if I don’t –”

Felix’s fingers dug into the boar’s wrists then. ”They’re dead,” he said, though he knew it to be useless. ”No one is talking to you but me.”

”I gave them my eye,” the boar said through heavy, almost frantic breaths. His eye slid open again, and Felix shuddered despite himself as Dimitri’s voice dipped low before rising again. ”They didn’t leave, but they stopped. Just for a bit. But they continued again – I won’t – I won’t be rid of them until I have _her_ head or I die...”

The manic undertone bled into his words with such intensity that Felix tasted bile in his mouth, and he relented his hold on one of the boar’s wrists just so he could pull at the dirty mane of hair. Dimitri didn’t retaliate with his freed hand, which only shook useless against the thigh it had fallen back on. So, even the beast could still feel battle exhaustion. Interesting.

”I don’t know why I bother,” he said with as much venom as he could force into his voice through the hurt. ”You’re never really going to lift your gaze up from your own damn feet, are you? You’re never going to see a damn thing around you, since your eyes are blind to reality and your ears clearly have ceased working too.”

His fingers slipped off the beast’s other wrist, as well as the disgustingly dirty hair, exhaustion catching up with him as he looked away from the face that insulted every dear memory Felix still had stored somewhere in the back of his mind. Dimitri said nothing to him, only continued muttering incoherently he begun to rock himself back and forth as he sat cross-legged on the stone floor that was much cleaner than when Felix had first arrived.

And yet, Felix’s eyes trailed back to the beast not even a full minute later, having caught a glimpse of Dimitri’s hands moving again. He was ready to snap once more – _stop hurting yourself, stop hurting everyone around you_ – until he saw that Dimitri didn’t continue scratching at the scabs of his wounds and scars. Instead, his fingers gingerly rubbed at something wrapped around his wrist. In this light and from this angle, Felix couldn’t tell what it was but Dimitri was being awfully gentle with it even in his absent-minded (and manic) state. At least he wasn’t muttering about the ghosts anymore, though the heavy silence that stood between them now wasn’t any better.

Five years’ worth of silence had been more than enough to Felix, but he didn’t have the energy to disturb the one forming between them now. Instead, he watched Dimitri’s fingers brush over what looked like a hair tie wrapped tightly around a wrist.

He had not seen the beast put his hair up, not that it was long enough to completely warrant a hairtie. Dimitri had never worn his hair up, either; he’d proudly let it touch his shoulders and allow Felix run his fingers through it as children. With some embarrassment, Felix could even remember his shameful attempts at braiding the hair that had shone golden under sunlight.

If Felix squinted hard enough, he could tell the too hair tie was frazzled and much too stretched; it wouldn’t hold up the bun he used to wear now. If he squinted harder, he could see the resemblance to the hair ties he had used back around the academy year – Felix had become a slave to mindless routine at the time, and the hair ties had all been the same kind, from the same Fraldarius merchant that used to come by to the family house.

Once, a hair tie had been left behind in a place that Felix had yet to visit again in the monastery. He had never gone back to retrieve it, out of embarrassment and inability to look at the boar straight in the face for the weeks following the incident.

_Don’t do this to yourself,_ _don’t give yourself hope._ Something fragile like that – Felix couldn’t afford to have it shatter as it had before.

That this – that this thing remembered and treasured something that hadn’t gone up in flames that day nine years ago –

Felix shook the inane hope away, for it was just that. Inane. Useless.

”It’s strange,” Dimitri’s voice interrupted his internal confusion, his tone achingly exhausted once more. Anger accompanied it, but it drowned underneath the oppressive weariness. Felix’s heart picked up the pace regardless, too preoccupied with the line of thoughts his mind had gone to. ”I can never push your hands away, Felix.”

Crouching in front of the beast was already sending an ache through his knees, so Felix sunk to sit down on them instead as he tugged the beast’s hands toward himself again. ”Because you can’t pretend with me,” Felix said as he got a closer look of the band around the relatively scarless wrist. ”I know what you are.”

”Yet here you still are,” the beast with Dimitri’s face said, voice falling so quiet Felix had to strain his ears to listen. The singular eye looked at Felix like it was only seeing him for the first time through the haze of internal pain Dimitri was now consumed by. Dimitri’s thumb still rubbed over the hair tie on his wrist, but the boar didn’t seem to notice that himself.

(A hand tugging the tie off his hair in a desperate jerk of a motion, lips parted beneath Felix’s, fingers clinging to the back of his head and keeping him there – almost as if saying _don’t leave me, Felix, don’t you leave me too._ The boy Felix had sworn his life to drowning in the mind of a beast.)

”Yet here I still am,” Felix confirmed with a thin voice, lips pursed together as he observed the other’s movements. He could say sorry for not being there to help him when everything went down with Cornelia. He could say sorry for not finding him sooner. But he had no voice for such things.

Apologies wouldn’t fix the damage, anyway – not the one inflicted upon Dimitri, not the one Felix was inflicting upon himself even now.

”Foolish,” the beast said, and for once Felix couldn’t help but agree with the thing that wore his friend’s face.

xvii. yellow roses.

Afterwards, Felix found himself back at the Goddess Tower and at the mercy of cold winter winds. He could still feel the press of Dimitri’s scars against his fingers, even through the leather, and a memory from long ago flitted across his mind from this very place. Boar had cast aside the gauntlets he always wore that night, for him, and Felix’s chest constricted as he thought of it now while he rubbed his gloved hands together in attempt to chase out the ghost of a feeling touching Dimitri had left behind.

Back then, he had watched Dimitri walk away from him, not knowing how things would change only in a matter of weeks, unaware of short months that would turn into excruciating years. Back then – back then the boar hadn’t quite looked him in the eye as they had danced, but his bare hand had been in Felix’s, the scars pressed against Felix’s calloused palm.

It had been the closest thing to honesty between them in _years_ at that point, and the memory of it had burned in the far edges of Felix’s mind through the nearly five years of separation. Now, at the scene of the memory, regret flashed through Felix once more. He didn’t like regrets – hated having any, hated people clinging to them instead of moving on and seeing to the things they had left to do. And yet he always found himself doing things he hated with Dimitri.

At heart, Felix was still that stupid naive boy, whose dearest wish had been to spend his life at Dimitri’s side while laughing at Sylvain’s idiocy and watching Ingrid marry Glenn and take up knighthood at his side. That boy was hurt and in pain, almost unrecognizable under the bruises his heart had taken over the years, but he was still there, and Felix realized it now as he gazed up at the clear full moon hanging above the monastery.

Under the pale light, the reflection of the sun’s beams, he felt vulnerable, like his own facade had been forced down for the first time in a long, long time.

_Yet here you still are,_ the boar had said.

”And here I still am,” Felix muttered as his hand rose to his chest, right over where his heart was beneath the layers of clothing and skin. The traitorous thing was beating much too hard from the idea that somehow, beneath the many layers of bloodlust and revenge, Dimitri still existed and waited to be pulled out.

But the thing was – Felix didn’t know _how_ to do that. He only knew how to hurt, how to prod at wounds until they opened, which words to choose to hurt the person the most. He had been raised a warrior, not a savior, and Felix knew his own weaknesses well enough by now.

And yet the mere possibility that Dimitri had chosen to keep something of _Felix_ instead of his ghosts… Felix’s heart pounded and his lungs ached with a feeling that had become more frequent again over the past few weeks after years of relative calm.

_To think,_ he thought, not with bitterness but reluctant surrender, _I’d be sick for a thing like that._ His fingers splayed against the fabric over his heart, and he could almost feel its beat.

Under the moon, the truth was easier to admit – that it was not any duty to his father or the Kingdom that would keep him trailing after the beast, but the fact that even after all this time Felix still wanted to chase after that boy from his childhood until he would finally catch up and be able to tell him, _don’t run away like that again, Dima._

A shallow, loathsome laugh escaped him at the thought. ”How idiotic,” he said out loud just to make the silence more bearable. ”As if a thing like that would happen.”

Even to his own ears, his voice sounded weak.

The thorns in his lungs prickled and grew, and Felix coughed once, twice, before the sound of approaching footsteps reached his ears. They weren’t as heavy as the boar’s would have been, but they were heavy enough for Felix reconize who it was and for a grimace to settle back on his face.

”Done with your flirting for the night?” he asked as he glanced at Sylvain’s approaching figure. His voice didn’t shake. Good. He looked back toward the low-hanging moon. ”I’m not in the mood for your shenanigans, Sylvain.”

”That’s how you greet the guy that came all the way here to check up on you, Felix?” Sylvain said and forced a laugh out of himself. Despite the warning signs, Sylvain came all the way to stand by Felix’s side, the flippant smile audible as he continued, ”That’s pretty heartless.”

”I’m quite sure that was my reputation at the academy, so why are you surprised?” Felix jerked his hand away from his chest, only to cross his arms as he sent a defiant stare in Sylvain’s way. Under his friend’s gaze he felt even more vulnerable than before. He’d seen that particular stare from Sylvain far too many times over the years as they had looked into the rumours regarding Dimitri’s survival: sharp, entirely too knowing.

”I doubt anyone thought you were heartless,” Sylvain said with a snort of a laugh. The easygoing smile was painful to look at when it made him think of the person already on his mind, so Felix turned away once more. ”Well, at least they wouldn’t have if they had got to know you, that is.”

Felix said nothing, and silence fell between them like so many times before through the months they spent together searching for Dimitri in their fathers’ stead.

”Besides,” Sylvain said, softer, ”I doubt anyone that could see you now would ever call you that.”

”What’s _that_ supposed to mean,” Felix bit out, trying to school his expression into something harder, something that would drive away the vulnerability and the image of the hair tie around the beast’s wrist printed on his mind. It didn’t quite work, as the only thing it accomplished was bringing heat to his face as his ever cruel mind conjured up the memory associated with a hair tie long-lost in the recesses of his and Dimitri’s past. A memory that should have been sweet, had it taken place under any other circumstances; a memory of two teens kissing with all the clumsiness that time brought with it.

He had wanted to forget that one so badly, and yet his mind always clung to memories Felix wished to toss away as though it was bent on hoarding and containing all of Felix’s misery for a full-on exhibition.

And now it felt like Sylvain was looking through that exhibition, beneath full moon and over the soft thumping in Felix’s chest.

”It means,” Sylvain said, brows wrinkled as he – for once in his Goddess-damned life – tried to pick the right words, ”you look like… you look like you’re _feeling_, Felix.”

”You say that like it’s a rarity,” Felix said, turning his eyes down to deflect Sylvain’s gaze off of him. The stone floor beneath his feet remained dirty with dust, rubble and mud that had yet to be cleaned. Then, Goddess curse his lips, he said, voice much more raw than even he himself expected, ”I’m not – I’m not without emotion, Sylvain.”

For several seconds that felt like full minutes, Sylvain said nothing, obviously absorbing his words and tone. Felix was about to speak again when Sylvain finally responded, ”I didn’t mean to imply you were. I… Better than anyone, I know you’re not.”

Another lapse of silence went by until Sylvain cleared his throat once more. ”Is this about Dimitri?”

_When has it not been_ hung precariously on Felix’s lips but didn’t slip out. Instead, he went for the lie he’d tried telling himself before. ”Nothing I do or feel revolves around that beastly thing.”

Sylvain snorted, and Felix caught sight of the smile dangling on his childhood friend’s lips. ”Come on, Felix. You know I know you better than that, don’t you?”

Sylvain came to stand closer to him then, but had the sense to not reach out to drape an arm around Felix’s shoulders as he usually would. ”This is probably a bad time to bring this up,” Sylvain said, ”but you talk in your sleep, buddy.”

The night air felt much colder on his face then, his heart stuttering out of surprise until it regained its usual rhythm. Felix’s skin tightened and prickled, and he sent a narrow-eyed glare to the man that never seemed to realize the harm his actions caused. ”Sylvain,” he snapped, but something in him was trembling and that something leaked into his voice. ”I told you to drop this. Mind your own business for once.”

”You’re gonna hate me for saying something so sappy, but,” Sylvain sighed, and something like sincerity emerged into his voice, ”I don’t want to see you hurting. I get that it’s much to ask, with everything that’s happened, but...”

”Hurting,” Felix repeated the word like it was one of Sylvain’s unholy attempts at cooking anything else than the cheese gratin Dimitri so loved. (Felix rather liked it too, but Sylvain didn’t need to know that.) ”I’m not the – I’m not the one _hurting_ here. If you want to see _hurt_, go back to the cathedral and look to your heart’s content. Look at everything that thing did in today’s battle.”

The memories came fresh, unbidden: of a beast leaping over the fences to reach the enemy commander quicker, ignoring the professor and everyone else but the enemy, the fur-lined cloak flashing red with fresh blood. As ever, the sight sickened Felix, and even thinking of it now made his insides tremble with – agonized grief, anger, confused sense of loss that he thought he might have been starting to overcome.

And yet, the thing he had found inside the cathedral just earlier, many hours after the battle, had been more fragile than the glasses Dimitri had spent a lifetime breaking by accident, even before everything changed. Wrapped around that creature’s wrist was a hair tie that at least resembled the ones Felix used to tie his hair up into a bun – usually unseen beneath all that armour, but Felix had seen it and lost his breath for the stupidity of it all.

The beast had rubbed his fingers over it like it was a _comfort_, one lifeline he had at the bottom of his own sea of misery and violence.

Maybe now it reminded Dimitri of Glenn, but it had never been Glenn whose hair a nine-year-old Dimitri clumsily tried to arrange into a proper ponytail. It hadn’t been Glenn whose hair younger Dimitri had tentatively played with when he was tired and sharing a bed with Felix.

”Felix,” Sylvain’s voice broke through Felix’s reverie, brought him back to the moment. ”You can’t say that while making that kind of face if you want to make me believe you.”

All these unwanted, _unwarranted_ feelings coursing through Felix like boiling water did not mix well with Sylvain’s well-intentioned but ultimately useless prodding. ”Fine,” Felix snapped and turned fully towards the other, arms crossed over his chest and hands clenched into fists. ”You’re right – is that what you want to hear so badly, Sylvain?”

The rant bubbled out of him before his mind could catch up with his mouth – as was usual with him, and as always Felix couldn’t quite stop himself in time. ”You keep pestering me about the cough – _yes_, I’m sick. Lovesickness, you called it back in the academy.”

Felix laughed bitterly, borderline hysterically, at the word. Lovesickness. It had always sounded like nonsense, but what else could it be when constantly thinking of Dimitri brought physical pain on top of the mental aches? The five years had put his mind and body at ease for long stretches of time when he got busy with something not Dimitri-related, but there were just as many weeks when Dimitri was constantly present despite his absence and presumed death.

”And yes,” Felix said, a bitter and bloody taste on his tongue as something scratched at his windpipe, the sensation so familiar Felix easily ignored it after clearing his throat, ”it’s about… that thing. Boar. As ever.” Felix’s nose wrinkled. ”Pathetic, isn’t it? Getting sick for… that.”

Sylvain, to his credit, hadn’t flinched away when Felix had raised his voice, hadn’t even taken a step backwards when Felix had subconsciously inched closer as if looking for a fight. Under the pale light, Felix couldn’t make out every detail of his expression, but he saw the downward-curled mouth and the pinch between brows – Sylvain was taking him seriously. Good. Or was it? Felix almost wished the other would laugh this off and they could pretend this hadn’t happened, just like other people tried to pretend the last five years hadn’t done irredeemable damage to whatever was left of Dimitri.

But Sylvain didn’t.

The Dimitri-sized chasm in Felix’s chest had never felt so immense before, and the slightest sliver of hope only made it worse, because Felix knew better than to believe in it but he would still cling to it despite that better judgment. Because he was still, irreversibly –

”It’s not pathetic to love someone, Felix,” Sylvain said, his voice as clear as the crisp nighttime air between them. His lips pulled into a tight smile right after. ”I know I have no right to say that, with the way I am, but…”

”So don’t,” Felix interrupted, only to be interrupted himself by the cough ripping through his throat. Hoarsely, with a hand pressed over his mouth, Felix managed, ”Stop analyzing my feelings.”

What Felix didn’t expect was for Sylvain to move toward him right then and wrap his arms around his smaller frame, surrounding him with unwanted warmth to combat both the cold of the night and the agonized mixture of resignation and hope.

The hair tie. The scarred hand Felix had held at the Goddess Tower many years ago. Blue eyes that had looked past him, brimming with sadness and longing. The month before the Goddess Tower: hand in Felix’s hair, holding him still, begging for him to stay where he was. Other events that blurred between one another, their exact times and places vanishing from Felix’s mind and only leaving Dimitri and himself in.

”Felix,” Sylvain said quietly, still audible even over the coughs that kept echoing into the night, ”you don’t have to suffer by yourself.”

”Again,” Felix muttered as he swallowed down blood and pride, not returning the embrace but standing in it anyway, ”you’re saying this to the wrong person.”

And five years too late.

(Felix’s hands shook as he tried to get the blond hair to obey him. Glenn had taken to braiding Ingrid’s hair for her, and he’d shown Felix how to do it, but in practice it was much harder, especially with hair shorter than Ingrid’s. Still, Felix was determined to see this through, if only to prove his brother that he could do this on his own.

And, well, _maybe_ it was nice to do something like this for Dima. Maybe that was the primary reason Felix had wanted to learn how to braid – he got curious about how Dima would look with one. His hair wasn’t long enough to a full braid like Ingrid’s, but smaller braids should do just fine, even though they were more delicate work.

Felix’s brows scrunched up with concentration as he fumbled with strands of blond hair when the head they were attached to shifted again. ”Dima,” he complained, ”I won’t get this right if you keep doing that.”

A blue eye peered at him, but this time he didn’t move his head to face Felix. ”I’m sorry,” Dima said, bright and honest, and Felix’s chest puffed with an odd sort of pride and contentment. ”I like watching you, Felix.”

Somehow, that broke Felix's concentration way more than Dima moving around had.

”Will you teach me how to do it?” Dima went on to ask.

”My brother taught me,” Felix said, hesitantly. ”He might–”

”Glenn teaches me other things,” Dima said, and Felix saw the side of his mouth curve into a pout. ”I want _you_ to teach me this.”

Felix’s face definitely heated up then, at the prospect of Dima wanting specifically _him_ to teach him something instead of their older childhood friend or Glenn.

”Anything for you, Dima,” he said.)

xviii. chamomile.

They were to meet with his father and some reincorcements at the Valley of Torment, and Felix couldn’t say he was looking forward to it despite his prickly comment regarding Rodrigue’s potential reaction to the boar’s current state of being. It hadn’t got anything out of the beast, which was disappointing but not surprising – ever since that one night, he had not said a word to Felix.

His father had been the one to first believe in Dimitri’s survival, and as much as Felix hated to admit it, the logic of it had been sound enough for Felix to believe in it, too. Enough to keep searching, at least, even though admitting so would be far too revealing. Sylvain had seen through his grumblings, in any case.

For better or for worse, the old man had never seemed to notice Felix’s illness. Felix had gone out of his way to hide it – it also helped that outside the academy and away from Dimitri the coughing had become rarer, though still triggered if Felix lingered on the memories for too long – so it wasn’t surprising, but even so, Rodrigue had always gone more out his way to look after the crown prince than him.

Felix supposed it was the age-long Fraldarius curse, to be so entwined with the Blaiddyd house that their own family ceased to matter.

The stories had never suggested it, but Felix wondered if Kyphon had ever resented Loog for the tight hold he had over his life, like some inescapable fate.

Felix knew he did, just as well as he knew his old man didn’t – ever in love with the past he shared with the dead king.

(The worst part was that Felix took after his father in many more ways than he cared to admit – and that, perhaps, was one of the reasons he could hardly stand looking at the man, the mirror of the person Felix could be on his way to become.)

In the heat of Ailell, the beast never took off his furs nor armour, which included his gauntlets. The beast sweated like a man – smelled like one that hadn’t washed in months, too, and that made Ailell even worse – but no complaint left his mouth. Sylvain, on the other hand, complained on the behalf of the entire army, and Felix’s head quickly started to ache from hearing the same thing day after day.

Thankfully, Ingrid was there to shut him up. Somehow, she had even less patience for Sylvain’s crap than she had back at the Academy – though, Felix supposed as he stared at her and the tight lines of her face from the corner of his eye, the entire situation they were in was just as stressing on her as it was to their more soft-hearted companions.

The bitterest part of Felix thought _do you understand how being around him was for me, back then _before he silenced that voice by clenching his jaw and taking a long sip from his water skin. If his chest ached, he didn’t register it – numb to it, his mind off in more important places. Like how he would much prefer the midwinter in Gautier territory to this heat that dove deep into his clothes and made his legs sluggish.

There was, Felix found, something immensely gratifying in seeing the boar shrug Rodrigue’s hands off before the old man could touch him for the healing spell he was intent on casting.

”Wasted effort,” he heard Dimitri retort.

_Yes, _ Felix would have thought once upon a time, with the anger of his seventeen-year-old self, _it clearly is._

The battle ended without casualties on their part, and Lord Gwendal’s forces deemed it fit to _not_ go on a suicide mission after seeing Dimitri glower at them from the side of their commander’s corpse. Even the beast didn’t deem it necessary to chase after them, instead opting to stand deathly still the next few moments until Felix’s father joined them and got off his horse.

”Do try to temper in your joy, Your Highness,” he said at the sight of Dimitri’s severe, unfeeling face, the humour in his voice ill-fitting for the situation. Felix said nothing, only pressed his lips thinner – and saw Dimitri do the same as he grumbled, ”You never change, Rodrigue.”

Felix observed his father observe Dimitri. Seeing the subtle shifts between a myriad of emotions on a face so similar to his own was unsettling to say the least, but the touch of grief that flashed in Rodrigue’s eyes felt validating, at least. Even if it wasn’t Dimitri his father mourned for – as always, it was the dead king and whatever was left of him in the world of the living.

To this day, seeing his father look at Dimitri like that twisted Felix’s insides into a tight, frustrated knot of anger. With no way to articulate his feelings without snapping and this definitely not being the right moment for it, Felix’s jaw only clenched tighter as Rodrigue finished studying Dimitri and went on with his ramble about how much a relief it was to see him alive, to which Dimitri gave no visible reaction.

_Corpse,_ he had called himself, and he still very much looked like one – sounded like that too, as he refused to turn to Fhirdiad, to the people that kept waiting for him.

The living held no power in his mind, and yet…

What truly surprised Felix was his father looking Dimitri straight in the eye and asking, in that unnervingly steady voice, ”Which is more important, the dead or the living?”

That.

That had never happened before.

Dimitri’s eye narrowed, and his voice cut like a blade through the air as he hissed, ”_Silence._”

It should have been too painful to watch, and yet… Felix, ever the masochist, kept his eyes firmly on this unfolding scene – and that was why he saw every detail of Dimitri’s changing expressions when Rodrigue gestured one of his knights over and revealed the late king’s Relic, Areadbhar.

…Well, as many details as he could without standing right in front of the boar’s violence-worn face.

In truth, it was the most emotion he had seen on Dimitri’s face since the night he caught the boar scratching his skin open, and not all of it was desperation or despair. Not that the look of utter reverence that crossed that face was much better – frankly, Felix had the urge to smack it off, because _that’s not how you should look at objects, you fool_ – but it was something different, and Felix would take it as proof that there was still something worth searching for in the corpse of a man.

Not that he had much need for proof, not when he was going to stick around anyway.

”Areadbhar,” Dimitri whispered hoarsely, voice thick with that reverent emotion. From Gilbert’s side, Felix could see his hands shake when he accepted the ivory lance from Rodrigue’s hands. ”Father’s...”

”It is yours, now,” Rodrigue said, voice much gentler than moments ago when he had argued with Dimitri over the direction the army ought to go. ”I managed to steal it back from one of Cornelia’s underlings. It is about time for it to return to its master’s hands.”

Felix snorted, unable to control himself. Even so, Rodrigue’s gaze didn’t slip to him as he muttered, ”As understated as ever, father. Getting that back must have been a struggle.”

Dimitri’s jaw clenched and unclenched a few times in his attempts at finding the words to say, and when he finally spoke, it was with a heavy voice tinged with emotion, ”I… I am grateful, my friend.”

Rodrigue smiled softly at that, and Felix tore his gaze away as a wave of dizziness washed over him.

Damn this heat. Damned Ailell. Damn his father – and damn this precarious hope in himself that would be as easily crushed as egg shells.

He’d always called Sylvain a fool, but it always took one to know one, didn’t it?

The old man joined forces with them, which Felix hadn’t expected but should have seen coming when Rodrigue brought up the promise he had made with Dimitri’s father, thus squashing all of Felix’s hopes that perhaps Rodrigue had let go of some of his own delusions over the years.

But no, of course he hadn’t.

Felix didn’t know why he bothered expecting anything else from his father.

The entire way back to the monastery, Felix avoided the man, using the dizziness that had been chasing him since the Valley of Torment as an excuse.

Not that it mattered much, as his father was busy catching up with Gilbert and throwing glances at the beast’s backside at every chance he got.

The memento of the dead clearly meant more than his still living son, but Felix couldn’t muster up the energy to feel properly bitter about it. He carried grudges like weapons, but even he grew weary of it.

He couldn't expect his father to be better when he himself wasn't.

”Felix.”

Back at the monastery, avoiding the inevitable became a bit too difficult, especially when Felix’s habits were so well-known not only to his friends but also to the old man himself. So, turning around and seeing Rodrigue stand at the entrance to the training grounds wasn’t as much a surprise as it was accepting what was eventually going to happen anyway.

”Father,” Felix said and took his time returning the training sword to its proper place in the weapons rack before again turning toward the old man. ”I was busy. Make it quick.”

Rodrigue had the gall to chuckle at him. ”Always so brisk with your words,” he murmured before shaking his head as if in disbelief. ”Have some tea with me, won’t you?”

Felix wasn’t sure whether to be thankful no one else was around or not. ”Make it quick,” he repeated as he walked up to the exit. The sand scrunched under his feet, and Felix nearly sighed in relief when his steps didn’t falter. ”My time’s better spent training than chatting nonsense.”

”You needn’t worry,” Rodrigue said. ”Just a quick cup in the quarters I was kindly given. I only wish to catch up with what’s been going on with you, Felix.”

”Right,” Felix muttered. ”I’ll believe it when I see it.”

The familiar scent of chamomile tea wafted through the room as Felix entered before his father, and that alone tipped Felix off that he hadn’t been the intended target for the invitation. Felix inhaled, swallowed down the sting, and pretended that it didn’t matter. Over the years, things had been better, despite the secrets Rodrigue never noticed that a father perhaps ought to have.

”That was his favourite,” Felix made the remark regardless, out of old spite. ”I take it I’m the back-up plan.”

”Preferably,” Rodrigue said with a sigh as he pulled out a chair for Felix, ”I’d have had both of you with me. It would have done His Highness good to reminisce of better times, but it appears he is in no mood for such.”

”He does enough brooding on his own just fine,” Felix said as he sat down on the offered chair and let his father pour tea for him. Felix didn’t move to add honey into it, only pulled the cup closer and looked down at its contents. The few times he had shared a moment like this with his old man and Dimitri had been before the rebellion, and Felix could remember very little of them but one detail had always struck him as strange – the solemnity with which Dimitri gazed down at the tea, the tremble of his fingers when he murmured, ”It smells divine, Rodrigue.”

Rodrigue poured a cup for himself, and they remained silent for a few long moments as Felix waited for the old man to get to the point behind this.

”...It was your birthday not too long ago,” Rodrigue eventually murmured against the edge of his cup, eyes on the surface of the liquid just as Felix’s had been just now. Neither of them were very good at making eye contact with one another, not since Glenn. ”Forgive me for not being able to procure a present for you.”

”...Was it?” Felix asked before realizing – yes, it had been almost two weeks since his birthday, not that it had dawned on him earlier. His gaze flitted away from his father and around the relatively bare and dusty room instead. It looked barely even slept in. ”...I’m not a child in want of pampering.”

Two months and almost two weeks since Dimitri’s birthday that Dimitri hadn’t even had a chance to celebrate – or have anyone around for it. Not that the beast cared or knew, as lost as his sense of time had become. Still, Felix's mouth filled with petals whenever he thought of it. Quickly, he took a long sip to cover it up, swallowing both the burn of the hot tea and the taste of iron.

”Perhaps not,” Rodrigue admitted. ”But even so, in these times, a little bit of light does all of us good.”

Again, Felix thought of the emotion in the beastly voice when Dimitri had received Areadbhar. The tremble, the quake, the disgusting reverence for a memento. ”That lance,” he said, annoyed with himself already, ”helps enough.”

Asides from that one night, it’d been the most affected Felix had seen the beast get by the deeds of someone living rather than the ghosts he so eagerly spoke to at the cathedral. It was just as fine a birthday present as anything, considering Felix had spent – he remembered now – the actual day in bed, a rare fever having overcome him and a petal-filled cough wrecking him in the privacy of his room. Sylvain had been nice enough to sneak off to the infirmary to get him some medicine.

”You took it back when you went mad and dashed to the capital behind my back, didn’t you?” Felix asked, rubbing his thumb over the porcelain. He didn’t remember much from that time, in all honesty: he had been so ill following the news, he’d barely noticed his father’s absence from the house. Felix chuckled, the sound much more raw than he’d intended, and his stare returned into his cup filled with Dimitri’s favourite tea. ”You and he are so alike with your recklessness.”

”I will admit,” Rodrigue said with a heavy sigh, ”I am not proud of my conduct back then, especially since retrieving the Relic was the only thing I could accomplish. Had I done something earlier, perhaps His Highness wouldn’t have...”

_Turned out the way he did,_ Felix filled in the words his father didn’t speak. ”It doesn’t matter what you should have done,” he said as he stared at the wrinkled reflection of himself on the tea. The very picture of a hypocrite, right there. Felix cleared his throat to rid himself of the persistent ticklish feeling in there. ”What matters is doing what you can right _now_.”

Rodrigue’s stare on him was a tangible thing he could feel on himself, so Felix pursed his lips and didn’t lift his head up. ”Yes,” the old man said, something relieved in his tone that Felix couldn’t understand. ”You are right, Felix… and thank you. For staying by His Higness’ side after you found him.”

What was Felix to say to that?

His destiny had always been woven into Dimitri’s, for better or for worse, and while he resented it, shaking those chains off wasn’t something he could do with his human strength alone. He might have promised not to die before Sylvain, and Sylvain promised likewise, but it wasn’t to him Felix’s life had been sworn.

”It wasn’t as though I could go home,” Felix said at length, lifting his gaze just enough to make sure Rodrigue saw the tight, displeased line of his mouth. ”Regardless of that fool, the Empire must be stopped. Innocent people saved. I didn’t do any of this for a beast that thinks itself dead.”

The silence between them weighed less than the knots in Felix’s chest, and so he was content to let it drag on as they both sipped at the tea neither of them particularly cared for.

xix. blue salvia.

Felix continued visiting the cathedral well past what would be the curfew back in the academy days. The beast wasn’t always there – not now that Rodrigue kept going there, as well. Felix supposed their short argument after the battle in Ailell had done something to strain the relationship in Dimitri’s mind.

Still, the beast had accepted the new armour Rodrigue had gifted him along with the dead king’s Relic. In fact, Dimitri was busying himself with said armour that night in the middle of the cathedral once more.

This was what Felix walked in on: Dimitri’s back turned to the entrance as usual, his low murmurs the only sound to break the silence asides from Felix’s too loud steps, his posture hunched protectively over both the ivory lance and the pieces of silvery armour. Upon getting closer, what Dimitri was doing became much clearer: he was polishing the pieces of already well-maintained armour.

Felix’s voice cut through the air sharply: ”So, you still have the presence of mind for something like this.”

Something clanked against the stone floor, and Dimitri’s shoulders visibly jumped. Felix’s brows furrowed – he had been deliberately loud in his approach just to avoid startling the beast.

”Go away,” the beast growled. ”Rodrigue’s not here.”

”As if I’d search for my old man,” Felix snorted as he came to hover over Dimitri and set his eyes on the pieces of armour set before them. The candlelight burned low around them, yet bright enough for a task like this. ”...Polishing an already polished armour seems like a useless thing to do, even for you.”

Without being prompted by the other, Felix sat down to watch Dimitri work. From the corner of his eye, he saw his jaw clench, clearly annoyed by his presence. _Good,_ Felix thought and stayed perfectly still where he sat.

”It gives me something else to do with my hands,” the beast finally said after a short pause. The words still came out in a low growl, but the way he hunched over the chest plate his hands used a cloth to rub clean screamed exhaustion. ”Not that they’re much good for anything but killing.”

Felix wished he could feel something else than heart-wrenching guilt at those words – even rage would be better than it. Perhaps it was the illness, constantly getting worse nowadays, combined with the small glimpses of a person beneath the hatred and vengeance. Like hot chocolate amidst the dead of the winter: surrounded by the cold, one mug of warmth was heavenly, not well-appreciated enough other times.

”Like you’re anything special,” Felix said lowly. ”Like you’re so different from the rest of us.”

It was a good night, because Dimitri didn’t start speaking of the ghosts as he had in Ailell. Instead, he shrugged. ”I seem to recall,” he said, tone distant, ”that you were good at braiding.”

Only now Felix noticed Dimitri’s hands were bare, neither gauntlets nor gloves covering it. Thin scars covered the pale skin, but no blood accompanied them tonight. Felix’s shoulders slumped despite himself, and he exhaled.

”That was Glenn,” he said, narrowing eyes at Dimitri’s profile as though the beast would begin speaking to the dead once more at the mention of Felix’s dead brother. ”I wasn’t that good at it.”

”That is not how I remember things.” The man still didn’t turn to look at him, but Felix could read his expression well enough from his side. A low, broken chuckle escaped Dimitri. ”But then again, it doesn’t matter.”

Felix said nothing to that, but kept his eyes on the hands rubbing a dampened cloth over the curves of silvery plates, over the darker sections that made up the depiction of the Blaiddyd Crest. In the candlelight, the scars on the backs of Dimitri’s hands were only barely visible. There weren't too many of those, his palms were the real battlefield.

Felix used to love holding those hands in his, used to love entwining their fingers as he dragged Dimitri along when Sylvain suggested something absolutely stupid Ingrid would scold them for later before joining them in the dirt and grass herself. That was before everything became stained in blood in his vision at that rebellion, when he no longer could reconcile the new Dimitri with the old one.

He still couldn’t, not when the beast pushed everything of old Dimitri away from it, but the anger had receded.

He’d been feeling ill ever since Ailell - more than usual – and that was the excuse he would later justify his actions with to himself.

He reached out to the hand closest to his, slowly just to make sure the beast caught sight of his movements – he was _not_ in the mood for broken fingers, thanks – and soon his fingertips touched the back of the hand he had once known much better. The beast startled, even though it had seen the approach and decided to allow it, and his wide frame stilled for one precarious moment.

Felix stilled, as well. He had patience as shallow as Sylvain’s fake personality, but he also wasn’t a reckless fool that dove headfirst into suicide missions like the corpse, Dimitri, beside him.

(Yet, he followed him – and wasn’t that just inviting death in sooner?)

Eventually, the beast sighed, his shoulders sagging with with the air rushing out of his lungs as he turned up his hand for Felix and spread his fingers just like he had when they were both younger and smitten with each other’s company.

Just like back then, Felix took the wordless invitation and entwined his fingers with the other’s and pressed both their scarred and calloused palms together. They no longer fit perfectly, the way they had all those years ago, but –

_It could be good enough_, Felix thought as he watched Dimitri continue his work with the chest plate with only one hand, fingers reverent as they brushed down metallic surface.

One day, it could be good enough.

If only Felix wasn’t running out of time, and Dimitri out of reasons to keep going.

xx. edelweiss.

The next time Felix saw the beast come undone with emotion other than anger was at Myrddin, when a familiar, ridiculously tall man of Duscur returned to their lives unannounced and rather unremarkably.

Amidst the battle, there was no time to catch up, but from the corner of his eye Felix saw Dimitri’s head continually tilting toward Dedue, as though he couldn’t quite believe the other was truly there amidst them. Felix’s own chest tightened with relief he could not place – he had done _nothing_ but spout awful anger-soaked words at Dedue back at the academy, and _fine,_ maybe he regretted that just as he regretted many other things – right before he dove back into the chaos of battle that was as familiar to him as ballroom dancing was to most other nobles outside Faerghus.

Magic burned on his fingertips, and lightning burned through another soldier’s armour. Another corpse at the boar’s feet, a useless offering that only twisted the metaphorical knife in Felix’s gut further.

_It’s only a matter of time before the ground beneath us collapses_, he had said, because despite the small moments far in-between the bad ones, this was Dimitri’s suicide mission he’d dragged all of them on.

The ground beneath Felix’s own feet had begun shattering years ago – had been shattering ever since, despite Felix’s best efforts to stay on unbroken ground.

”Don’t – don’t _ever_ throw your life away for me again.” Dimitri’s voice was loud enough to even reach where Felix rested against the wall of one of the houses left untouched by the chaos of battle. His eyes fluttered shut, he only listened as familiar exhaustion washed through him, accompanied by the same dizziness that had become commonplace since Ailell.

”As you wish, Your Highness.” Dedue’s answer was quieter, but the relief in it felt like a punch in the gut.

_How can you be happy with that_, Felix wondered, but he wasn’t asking it only from Dedue. Beneath his arms, his hands clenched, nails digging into numb skin through thick leather gloves. In the farthest corner of his mind, the memory of the beast’s hand allowing his to hold it played.

When Felix coughed, both blood and flower petals came out, and the petals were so covered in crimson and spit that their original colours could not be distinguished no matter how hard Felix squinted.

He knew others would be more than happy to throw a quick celebration – a meager one, as they still needed to ration their meals – for Dedue’s return, and he wasn’t going to deny them that. Only to avoid it himself, as he was already plenty exhausted himself upon returning to Garreg Mach. Carrying on straight from the Bridge of Myrddin had been an unpopular idea, and perhaps due to whatever little spark of relief Dedue’s return had brought, Dimitri hadn’t fought hard against the idea of returning to the monastery for a while. Now that Dedue had returned, there was little need for Felix to keep watch over the beast, too, so he had kept his distance from both Dimitri and Dedue.

Not that avoidance could go on forever – he knew it from the academy year, but some things he was still long ways from growing out of.

Sylvain somehow managed to rope him into attending the second Blue Lions reunion – though Dimitri was absent from this one as he was busy drowning himself with his ghosts, as usual – and Felix, for the life of himself, couldn’t remember how he had done it as he watched the others speak animatedly about the things that had happened during the five years.

Thankfully, the dining hall was full with the knights of Seiros and Fraldarius soldiers as well, so Felix figured slipping out unnoticed wouldn’t prove too much a challenge after a while of tolerating Sylvain’s nonsense, Ingrid’s frowns and occasional gentler smiles at Dedue, and everyone else being just a tad too cheerful for the time they lived in.

He hadn’t expected Dedue to be the one to gesture him to come along with him toward the kitchen.

”I wish to make some dessert for everyone,” Dedue said to him in an unnervingly even tone and even more even stare that Felix was unable to meet. ”Will you come along?”

”Oh no,” Sylvain said from Felix’s other side. Felix just _knew_ he was recalling the unfortunate incident with the Gautier Cheese Gratin, so he promptly shoved his elbow into his friend’s side before the idiot could speak further of it.

If he hadn’t been waiting for the chance to slip out, he would have said no.

”Sure,” he said instead, even while knowing that Dedue wasn’t inviting him because of any pre-existing cordiality between them. If anything, he expected Dedue to elbow him in the face as soon as they got to the kitchens – and, Felix admitted, he kind of did have it coming for the things he said to him five years ago. The sentiment behind his words was still true – _blind obedience is disgusting and helps no one, least of all the boar _– but perhaps there had been a better way to go about it outside of mocking Dedue and his and Dimitri's relationship.

Dedue merely nodded at him as the rest of the table cheered – Annette’s delight at dessert made Felix sigh and _all right_ maybe he’d try his hand at it if he must – when he and Felix left for the kitchens that should be blissfully empty by now.

”Don’t burn the place down,” Sylvain called after him, with laughter that grated on Felix’s nerves with how reminiscent of better times it was.

The short walk to the kitchens had been a silent one, but Dedue finally opened his mouth as the door slid shut behind them. ”I wished to thank you – and to ask something.”

”Thank me,” Felix repeated. Had auditory hallucinations found him now too? As if one delusional person wasn’t enough at the monastery. ”I don’t recall ever doing something for you.”

Dedue dropped the ingredients they had picked up from the supply storage along the way, his back turned to narrow-eyed and very flabbergasted Felix. As he began chopping up vegetables for the quick salad he was obviously intent on making, Dedue said, ”For looking after His Higness, of course.”

”Looking after–... what in the flames would give you the idea that I would waste my time like–”

”Annette told me she’s seen you wander to the cathedral at night frequently,” Dedue said calmly and without turning to look at him. Felix’s cheeks burned, but the feeling behind the heat flaring across the skin could have been anything, not just embarrassment. ”I have been informed that is where His Highness spends most of his nights.”

Felix’s mind blanked out. Annette. Of course she would – she spent way too much time working hard instead of taking care of herself _or_ minding her own business. Of course she would have been the one to see him cross the bridge to the cathedral and draw conclusions. He hoped she wasn’t going to turn _that_ into a song – as amusing as her song repertoire was a whole, he wouldn’t care much for that addition.

”Maybe, just maybe, I have been going there to pray when no one’s looking,” Felix said slowly, grimacing at his own words. ”There’s many number of reasons I could be going there, so don’t thank me for something I haven’t done.”

He could sense Dedue rolling his eyes even as the man kept slicing tomatoes, the sound of the knife hitting the cutting board as loud as Felix’s heartbeat in his ears. ”You never struck me as the kind of person with a habit for praying.”

Dedue knew him better than he had imagined. Felix’s lips curled at the words, a huff escaping through his nose. ”Whatever,” he said, pursing his lips. There was something that had been nagging at him, though. ”Why aren’t _you_ with him now, then? The beast you followed so dutifully back in the academy.”

”Because it is not only His Highness I wished to meet again,” Dedue said, voice quiet and tone almost melancholic underneath the stoicism. The knife’s blade slammed against the board once more. ”When Ashe told me everyone wished to celebrate my return, I simply couldn’t refuse.”

”Ah, of course.” Felix couldn’t say anything bad about Ashe, really, despite how silly and outright dangerous his idealization of knighthood was. Years hadn’t changed that part of him much, but at least he wasn’t a suicidal fool like some other people Felix knew. ”...What were you going to ask of me, then? I’m not his babysitter, so no, I’m not going to take over your watch of him.”

”That is not it,” Dedue said with a huff that would have sounded exasperated if Dedue wasn’t the most ridiculously patient man Felix had ever met. Excluding when it came to Dimitri’s safety and honour. ”Perhaps this is useless prying on my part, but… You are ill, correct?”

Had Felix been holding anything when the so casually spoken question shot out, he would have dropped it and it would have shattered into thousands of pieces if it were something breakable. As it were, the only thing to fall was Felix’s heart – all the way down to his stomach, but it had already been in pieces for years so nothing of importance could shatter now.

”What gives you that idea?” he asked.

”On our trip back, you avoided everyone.”

”That is not unusual for me.”

”Yes,” Dedue agreed, ”but Sylvain seemed unusually concerned by that.”

Ah. The curse of having childhood friends that actually cared for him. ”That doofus worries a lot more than his exterior suggests. Pay no mind to–”

Unfortunately, a wave of dizziness washed through him right in the worst moment, and with it came the coughing and the rattling, unsettling feeling in his lungs. Felix stumbled backwards until his back met with the door, and there he trembled until the nausea went away, slowly but surely, and left him with heavy breaths and embarrassment at proving Dedue’s assumption correct so soon.

”You were saying?”

”Damn you,” Felix cursed and tried to push himself off the door with very little success as his legs kept on trembling. ”Fine, I’m not… at my best. But I’m not getting in anyone’s way on the battlefield.”

Dedue glanced at him over his broad shoulder then, and Felix clenched his hand into a fist, fingers curled over the petals coughed into his palm. Even so, a few petals fell, and Dedue’s eyes trailed to the mess on the floor at Felix’s feet. ”I was not worried about your battle prowess,” he said as he lifted his gaze to meet Felix’s, ”but yourself, rather.”

The chopping sounds ceased, and the knife was put down.

”I was never nice enough to you to warrant such concern,” Felix said, sneer slipping into his voice before he could help it.

”No, you were not.” Dedue turned to him fully then, arms crossed over a wide chest, his scarred lips a thin line.”I cared not what you said about me, however. It was the way you lashed out at His Highness that truly bothered me – but I have had time to think about much, ever since the day I helped His Highness escape from the dungeons.”

Felix had a terrible feeling about where Dedue was going with his words, but nevertheless persisted, scowling at the man. ”Don’t put any strange ideas on me. Whatever you’re assuming–”

”It is a sickness of the heart,” Dedue murmured, ”which you’re suffering from. Is it not?”

”A sickness of the heart,” Felix repeated, grimacing at the sound of it. Not that it was untrue, but it made the situation disgustingly more dramatic than just spitting out petals was. Though Felix couldn’t deny the roots of such sickness, not anymore and hadn’t for a while. ”...That’s one way to put it, I suppose.”

”We of Duscur have heard stories of it. Of the Hanahaki disease,” Dedue said then, much to Felix’s surprise. ”It was a common thing to talk about when I was a child. I was quite surprised people of Fódlan hadn’t heard of it before our academy year.”

”The what?”

”Hanahaki disease. You didn’t know the name for what ails you?”

”I never said that’s what ails me–” A cough, accompanied by spit-coated petals sticking to his chin. ”...Damn it.”

”The Hanahaki disease,” Dedue continued unperturbed, though Felix saw his eyes narrow minutely, an expression of a feeling Felix couldn’t name crossing them in that moment, ”is an unfortunate consequence of perceived one-sided love. That is how it is described. There are many stories in Duscur that give details of it, though the disease does not originate from there.”

”What does this have anything to do with what you’ve been saying?” Felix muttered as he wiped his chin clean of both the spit and the flowers that thankfully weren’t covered in blood this time. His lungs ached, however, and dizziness buzzed through him. ”Fine, I’m sick, but–”

”Love,” Dedue said plainly, ”makes people behave irrationally.”

Felix was both glad that Dedue had chosen the discreet route for this talk and annoyed that he couldn’t escape from the situation with his dignity still intact. The vulnerable feeling Dedue’s narrow gaze instilled in him was reminiscent of that night with Sylvain at the Goddess Tower – when Felix’s chest had been too full, when that damn hair tie burned vibrantly in his mind like a sign of Dimitri still being in there somewhere.

Now, Felix’s skin ran hot with a similar feeling of exposure: Dedue could see right through him, like Sylvain, and he didn’t know what to do other than resort to his juvenile anger that he hadn’t yet grown out of. The words came out with difficulty, too thick in his mouth. ”Don’t – don’t –”

”I have only ever known His Highness from the moment he saved me,” Dedue said, and the emotion in his voice was unmistakably gratefulness. Adoration, even. Felix’s stomach rolled at the feeling Dedue wasn’t ashamed of showing. ”But you knew him long before that. And I failed to take that into account five years ago.”

”Knowing him a long time doesn’t amount to much,” Felix said, sighing afterwards. ”Fine, he was my childhood friend. The closest one.”

Dedue nodded. ”I have always had a hard time imagining how His Highness used to be like before the Tragedy. But you have memories of that time. And I now realize… perhaps that is why you lashed out at him so often.”

”There’s a simpler explanation,” Felix said and forced himself to smile sarcastically, even though it didn’t feel right on his lips. He still itched to run, to escape Dedue’s gaze that felt all too piercing on his skin. The doorknob pressed awkwardly against his back, and yet Felix’s legs felt too weak still to properly support him. ”Perhaps I’m just a bad person.”

”I do not believe that to be the case,” Dedue said. The room felt even smaller as he frowned at Felix. ”I saw you protect our classmates more often than not, even back in the academy. Even His Highness, when I was unable.”

A distant, blurred memory came to mind: a dazed boar just behind him as Felix’s palm shifted and twisted on the hilt of his sword, determined to not look behind again but refusing to leave him regardless. It was so long ago, and yet nothing much had changed, asides from Felix’s feelings – sickness – growing worse.

He coughed again, but no petals came out this time despite the scratching in his lungs and the fluttery, leafy feeling in his throat. The kitchen felt too hot, suddenly, and Felix claustrophobic. ”Get to the point, already.”

Dedue remained silent for a moment, scrutinizing Felix and his face. Felix’s eyes shifted off to the side, just so he didn’t have to watch Dedue watch him. ”You are in love with him,” Dedue said, as though he was making an observation of weather and nothing more, ”and ill for it.”

The silence that followed was deafening over the roar of Felix’s blood in his ears. Sylvain had thrown the implications in the air before, but he had never accused him directly of being the kind of fool that couldn’t let go of a stupid childhood crush. Sylvain didn’t need to, not with words. It had been Felix that admitted it that night.

”And?” he said, shoulders sagging as he let his weight fall back against the door. His head ached, but not as much as his heart. Slowly, his eyes slid shut. ”It doesn’t matter what my feelings are. They’re not going to help the situation.”

”Feelings themselves do not,” Dedue agreed. ”But your actions are not meaningless.”

That night at the cathedral when his hand slipped into the beast’s, the beast’s fingers allowing his to curl between them, flashed through Felix’s mind, an obsessive thought that shouldn’t matter when most other times Dimitri’s stubbornness and vengeful drive got in the way of everything. Felix sighed, but it came out as a choked laugh. ”Aren’t they? I’m just as big a fool as my father.”

Dedue didn’t say anything for a while, and for a moment Felix dared to hope the conversation was done. But Dedue didn’t turn back to his vebetables, only pursed his lips thoughtfully as his stare weighed on Felix like bricks. ”You may be aware of this,” he began at length, slowly as though considering each word, ”but after the massacre of my people, I came to the castle with His Highness.”

”As his servant,” Felix said, waving the hand not covered in petals dismissively. ”I am aware.”

”My room was situated right beside his, naturally,” Dedue said, ”as it was what His Highness wished for.”

”Makes sense.”

”I recall the early weeks especially well. His Highness barely slept, but when he did, he often woke up screaming loud enough to wake me as well.” Dedue’s face stiffened, expression darkening. Felix couldn’t tell what his own expression was like – he remembered well enough how it was to sleep in a room adjacent to Dimitri’s.

”I recall clearly,” Dedue continued, ”some nights like that when His Highness sneaked into my room. But it wasn’t me he was looking for.”

Felix’s heart came treacherously close to stopping.

”I remember waking up to him calling out your name,” Dedue said, his mouth relaxing ever so slightly, close to smiling. ”He sounded so desperate. And horrified when he realized it was my room he had come into. His Highness would apologize for days on end for such behaviour.”

Felix’s gaze dropped to the floor before he could help it, face burning. ”...That boar…” Then, he sighed again, shrugging his shoulders. ”We used to sneak into each other’s rooms when we were still kids, especially when we had bad dreams. Some habits die harder than others.”

Dedue nodded. ”Those nights showed me how he cared for you. How he needed you. So I was rather surprised when we met at the Academy.”

”Look,” Felix snapped, and this time he managed to pull himself away from the closed door, ”I’m not going to apologize for everything I said back then.”

”That is not what I’m after,” Dedue sighed. His arms twitched at his sides restlessly, with what Felix assumed was the need to do something. ”I merely wished to ascertain whether my suspicions were correct. I must admit, I am rather relieved that they were. Although it seems you have suffered too long, just as His Highness has.”

Being offered condolences and pity had never suited Felix well, and he furrowed his brows at the other man while discreetly wiping his hand clean. ”I don’t need your pity.”

”I understand,” Dedue said, a small smile tugging at his lips. ”Receiving compassion… It was difficult for me too, once. Perhaps… it still is.”

Goddess, what would it take for this man to _shut up_?

”If you’re done now, I have something to say to you too,” Felix said, brows furrowed deeper. This time, he met Dedue’s gaze head-on and kept it. ”I know the boar said it already, but don’t you dare go dying on him again. Or any of us, for that matter. It would be… rather annoying.”

Dedue’s mouth twitched into a clear smile while Felix’s curled down into a defiant frown. ”I shall endeavour to not cause undue annoyance to you and His Highness, then.”

”Good.” Felix finally walked to the counter Dedue had been working on. He took the knife and continued where Dedue had left off, conscious of the mild amusement he could sense coming from Dedue’s direction. ”...I’ll help you with the vegetables.”

When all was said and done, Felix sighed and rolled down his sleeves. ”You can return to the others, I’m going to the cathedral.”

”...For prayer, I presume.”

If Dedue wasn’t so serious all the time, Felix would think he was making fun of him. ”...What else would I be going there for?”

This time, Dedue did chuckle.

On his way to the cathedral, as he was walking across the bridge leading to its doors, he caught a glimpse of a girl that couldn’t have been older than Annette had been back in the academy year. In passing, Felix felt uneasy at the intensity the girl stared at the cathedral with: her head didn’t turn toward him as he passed her nor did she acknowledge him at all.

She only stared.

But it was easy to pass off as reverence at what was being rebuilt, and so Felix did just that and didn’t give a second thought to the girl with brown hair and eyes that burned with both fire and ice.

By the time Felix returned to his quarters, exhausted in every sense of the word, the night had crawled upon the monastery. Someone had left a lit candle on the room's solitary desk not too long ago based on how little wax had dripped, and little ways from it stood a cup of still steaming tea and a package of what looked like tea leaves when Felix inspected it.

Beneath the package was a folded note, which Felix took out and unfolded, though he could guess its contents and sender well enough.

_Tea from Duscur that has been shown to alleviate the symptoms a little. -Dedue_

Felix shook his head in mild dismay – there were so many other more important things to worry about than himself – but thankfulness sprouted as he took a sip from the tea, which was delightfully spicy and almost scalding enough to numb his tongue.

_He called out your name,_ Dedue had said, and Felix could easily picture a younger Dimitri wandering aimlessly into a room and saying ”Felix?” with a barely quivering voice, blue eyes wide and watery.

Felix had been the crybaby, but Dimitri had had plenty of teary expressions of his own back when he knew how to cry.

Inhaling through his nose, Felix took a longer sip that burned his lips just to rid himself of the memory that his mind conjured up too readily, too easily considering how Felix had tried to forget.

But, he supposed, that meant his mind was at least able to latch onto something other than the absolute worst memories.

Sometimes he had doubted it.

xxi. marigold.

Despite the common belief, even the beast had to sleep sometimes. Felix had occasionally walked in on him dozing off in the cathedral, but he had quickly awoken to the footsteps while Felix cursed the heels of his boots. Sometimes, though, he wasn’t at the cathedral.

Those times Felix would back right out, cross the bridge, and head back to the knights’ hall and sure enough he would find Dimitri curled up over the sofa located before the fireplace. He slept differently than how Felix remembered, but that was no surprise: Dimitri had lived and slept like a beast the past years, and that carried on as he still remained a beast despite the occasional cracks that threatened to show a human beneath.

Dimitri mostly slept while sitting now, back usually pressed against a wall of some sort, hand curled around the handle of a spear – Areadbhar these days, and he clung to the Relic like it was his last lifeline. That was when he slept at the cathedral.

But sometimes he would curl up over the sofa in the makeshift library section at the knights’ hall while the fireplace was still burning and casting weak light over the face turned towards the heat. The way Dimitri’s tall and broad body barely fit the sofa made it look as uncomfortable as sleeping on a horse, but Felix would keep that complaint to himself as long as Dimitri got some sleep for once.

The nights spent at the knights’ hall tended to be the calm ones most often, though Felix never stayed for long enough to find out just how many nightmares Dimitri could handle before giving up on sleep for the night. Just long enough until Felix’s own insomnia would begin to give way to sleepiness.

Tonight was one of those nights that found Felix at the knights’ hall with the sleeping body of Dimitri. Occasionally a knight or two would walk in to return a book or for something else Felix didn’t much care about, but none of them dared to approach or even look in Felix and Dimitri’s direction. Sometimes it would be Dedue, either bringing Felix tea or telling him he’d take over for him – the latter which Felix often refused, since he couldn’t sleep anyway and training would be counterproductive.

He _wasn’t_ watching over Dimitri every night, despite what the professor and Sylvain had come to believe. No, that was mostly Dedue. But every now and then – like tonight – Felix couldn’t help but go to him, even if just to stand in the distance.

In tonight’s case, however, there was very little distance between them, as Felix had sat down at the feet of the sofa and as a result, Dimitri’s steady breathing indicative of sleep tickled the back of his neck. Dimitri had initially faced the back of the sofa, so his back had been turned to Felix’s, but he had shifted and turned around with a loud exhale of a sigh only minutes ago, and now Felix was entirely too aware of the breath against his neck.

If he glanced behind, he would see that Dimitri looked properly washed for once, undoubtedly thanks to Dedue. There were things Felix had been willing to do, but bathing the beast hadn’t been one of them, not when he didn’t know what would trigger his next coughing fit.

Dimitri would never know how much Felix suffered over him, and it was better that way.

Instead of looking back, Felix kept his eyes on the fire, with a familiar surge of restlessness in his veins. He’d never been that good at sitting and doing nothing, but tonight he didn’t have any weapon maintenance to do and training was out of the question.

That restlessness only grew over the next passing moments until Felix found himself unable to stay still and rose to his feet with the intention of fetching himself a book to pass the time with until he would become drowsy enough to make his way back to his quarters and actually manage to catch some sleep.

As he was climbing up to his feet, however, a huff from Dimitri halted his movements.

”El,” came a low mutter from the sleeping form behind Felix, who slowly looked back towards Dimitri on the sofa. The beast’s face had contorted: gone was the almost peaceful expression from the last time Felix had glanced at him, replaced by a tight grimace and a sleep-heavy voice that still managed to shake with anger. ”El… kill…”

A horrible feeling that had nothing to do with his persisting illness rose up Felix’s throat as he listened on, feet rooted to the place as though they too had joined up in torturing him further. Felix had once been better at walking away – much, much better – or, at least, he thought he had been.

Now, his lungs closed up and his legs remained stiff.

Dimitri breathed out, ”Sister”, like a terrible curse.

All air escaped from Felix’s lungs, as though he had been struck right in the gut.

(”I wish I had siblings,” Dimitri had once told him on one of his many visits to Fraldarius, lips curled down as he picked at the grass both of them sat on.

”It’s not as great as it looks like,” Felix said, looking up so Dimitri wouldn’t see the pout on his own face. _I don’t need more competition for your attention._

Dimitri’s laugh was a much nicer sound than the birds above them, and Felix smiled a little and reached out for the hand beside his. ”Still,” Dimitri said as their fingers curled together, ”I wish I had a sister, at least.” Then, more grumpily, ”Maybe then I would stop being mistaken for a girl.”

Felix snorted, held onto that hand more tightly than he should have, before saying as sincerely as an eight-year-old possibly could, ”It’s not their fault you’re so pretty.”

”Stop saying Sylvain things!” Dimitri squeaked, an unmistakable flush on his cheeks as he looked away from Felix and toward the ground.

”Soooorry,” Felix said, extending the vowels with a grin that refused to leave his face, without sounding very sorry at all. Then, in a more worried tone, ”Don’t be mad, Dima?”

It took a few seconds, but Dimitri soon peeked at him from beneath his blond bangs, a grin spread on his lips, ”I could never be mad at you, Felix.”)

A sickening kind of understanding spread through Felix as he watched Dimitri’s sleeping face twisting minutely from one expression to another. The girl Dimitri had wanted a dance with – the Flame Emperor – Dimitri’s target for vengeance. _His sister_.

”Is this some kind of twisted joke?” Dimitri had asked five years ago, and Felix could still recall the hysterical laugh accompanying them. It was one of the moments he hadn’t let himself forget out of habit for misery – _this is what he is, this is what Tragedy did to him_ – but he hadn’t ever thought he’d receive a more horrifying context for it.

It was a question Felix would rather like an answer to, as well.

But before any of that, before Felix would go back to his quarters and mull over this revelation – or whether he’d even drawn the right conclusion - Felix reached out to tug at Areadbhar tucked awkwardly beside Dimitri on the sofa.

Just as expected, the beast’s hands shot out as soon as he did that, startled into immediate awareness by the slightest movement, to grip the spear and to push Felix away from it. Felix stumbled backwards, would have collided with the fireplace if he hadn’t been ready for the strike and regained balance quickly, as Dimitri gripped the lance so tightly Felix was sure he heard something begin to crack.

Maybe it was the remains of his heart.

The wild look in Dimitri’s eye burned as the beast looked around, as though expecting Edelgard herself to jump out of somewhere. ”Edelgard,” it hissed, spite and righteous anger bleeding into the name, and really, Felix hated how immensely Dimitri’s own feelings had destroyed him.

”Not here,” he said to the beast and gathered himself. Dimitri seemed to relax at the sight of him, though frankly Felix was surprised Dimitri saw him at all. His heart pounded still, but exhaustion was beginning to catch up with Felix finally. So, he turned his back on the other, throwing his hand up carelessly in a dismissive wave at the confused creature that still contained fragments of the Dimitri Felix missed painfully. ”Scatter back to your cave, Your Beastliness.”

Before heading back to his own quarters, he went to knock on Dedue’s door. ”Your turn,” he said through the thick wood after he heard the first sound of movement, and immediately continued making his way upstairs, ignoring the buzzing mess that consisted of his feelings and memories.

xxii. red tulips.

Next up, Gronder Field. More messy feelings to be expected. Felix grew so weary of them – but might as well get it over with. The sooner the war ended, the better, even though it felt much like marching into their own deaths. Yet, Felix’s eyes never strayed from the back of Dimitri’s head, and his legs followed. Still chasing through the mud of grief and heartbreak. Felix was the biggest fool of them all in this court of jesters, but he was starting to come to terms with it. Kind of.

(”Dima, Dima, wait for me–!”)

The coughing never seemed to stop these days, even with Dedue’s tea that soothed his throat just right. He tasted blood in his mouth more often than not, and the dizziness haunting him since Ailell washed through him when he so much as glanced in Dimitri’s general direction. Sylvain noticed, and worried – worried so much more than what was necessary, even when Felix pushed him aside and told him to put his focus on where it ought to be.

This wasn’t the time. Not when there were so many things more urgent than the illness borne out of a love that refused to wither, just as stubborn as Felix himself.

Even his old man had noticed by now, though he didn’t know it was anything worse than an ill-timed cold. Still, he took the time to scold Felix, just like when he was a child and Glenn was still around, with a worried face that was directed _only_ at him, not at Dimitri or any Fódlan map.

_Disgusting_, Felix wanted to say, but a part of him – a part of him had ached to be noticed for so long, he couldn’t deny the old man the chance to care for him entirely. Just this once, he thought as Rodrigue tucked him in and stroked his hair and Felix pretended the flush on his cheeks was fever-induced.

Useless effort on his old man’s part, of course. Felix had been ill for far longer than the man would ever know.

”Felix,” Ingrid said, lips pursed and eyes narrow with worry. ”You should stay behind. It’s obvious you’re still very ill.”

”Not ill enough to stay back and do nothing,” Felix retorted and glared at her nose instead of the familiar green eyes. ”Who knows what that idiot will do without me.”

Especially when Edelgard was leading the enemy army this time around. Felix’s stomach twisted into hard knots, the memory of the beast’s hiss for his sister’s head fresh on his mind. _Can he really kill his sister, _he wondered.

Then, a more disturbing thought: _not without killing himself too._

He’d been calling this whole campaign Dimitri’s suicide mission all along, but perhaps it was even truer than Felix had believed before. Felix’s lips thinned into a downward line as he looked away from Ingrid entirely. ”I’m not going to get myself killed,” he said, a bitter taste of blood in his mouth, ”but I won’t let anyone else do something that stupid, either.”

Ingrid exhaled, the sound heavy and regretful. ”You’d better not,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. ”Glenn was one thing, but I cannot bear the thought of losing you, Sylvain, or His Highness on top of that.”

”Then it’s not me you should be scolding,” Felix scoffed, ”but those two suicidal fools.”

”Maybe,” Ingrid said, voice surprisingly small. Felix turned to look at her, only to see her head hung low and hands clutched together anxiously. ”But, please, Felix… please be careful.”

He knew perfectly well why she was saying this to him, perfectly aware of Glenn’s ghost that continued to hover above them all despite their best efforts to move on – well, save for Dimitri, who clung to the ghosts as though they were his lovers.

Bitterly, Felix thought: _none of us are cut out for this sort of life._

The Battle of Gronder became an even bloodier mess than they had imagined beforehand: old classmates were cut and slashed down, corpses piling over corpses, and screams that sounded too familiar echoing across the fields. The battle for Myrddin had been nothing compared to shis, but there was no time to ponder over the harsh reality of war, only to fight and survive and protect his allies, shoving them out of the way if necessary.

Felix’s lungs burned, but it was a familiar burn from the exertion battle brought with it, and the number of enemies he cut down increased – no point in counting, it didn’t matter, and Felix’s eyes were searching for something else anyway.

Thankfully, Dimitri was as stupidly conspicuous as always, his roars audible even over the warfare.

For one passing moment, Felix felt sympathy for Kyphon trickle into his mind.

Serving a stupid king must have given him much grief all those centuries ago.

What a cursed thing it was, to be born into House Fraldarius.

The thoughts of the inescapable fate washed away as soon as they had appeared as Felix’s sword sank into another’s flesh, the soldier less armoured and their flesh easily cut despite how they nearly dodged the strike. Purple hair cascaded down as they fell, and a pained whine – a call for homeland not in Fódlan – followed before Felix finished the job with a sharp stab of his sword.

A familiar face, perhaps, had Felix spared more than a glance.

But there was no time.

His fool of a king was out there.

(”I’m going to spend my forever with Dima,” Felix had declared to Glenn with his face as red as a rose . ”You have Ingrid. Back off.”

Glenn laughed, his hand in Felix’s hair. ”Jealousy is not a good look on you, Felix.”)

”Edelgard!” For what it was worth, Dimitri hadn’t got himself killed yet, despite making himself the most obvious target by running off and shouting like that. By the Goddess, Felix would strangle him himself by the end of the battle.

At least, his roar made tracking him easy even through the the chaos of a dying battle. The Imperial soldiers had begun to retreat under the attacks from both the Kingdom and the Alliance forces, though in the confusion the two non-Imperial armies had also battled each other instead of unifying against the shared threat.

That Emperor and her right-hand man were truly a fearsome pair, but even so, the battle wasn’t turning in their favour. Even as the central hill burned, so did Imperial soldiers, but their screams faded under the thunderous roars of a beast hunting for revenge.

It all felt so very far away now – the beast, Dimitri, holding Felix’s hand, their fingers entwined, and the hair tie wrapped around his wrist like a memento of better times – but Felix was a fighter, and the flickering flame of hope had yet to die out completely.

He pushed on and cut through his enemies, as singleminded as he always was and always would be – for that was him, Felix Hugo Fraldarius, and he would cling to his identity with all his might even if ghosts threatened to steal it from him.

(Dima’s face broke off into a toothy smile as he said, ”I’ll never let go of your hand, Felix. I promise.”

”And I won’t let go of yours,” Felix murmured, shy but transfixed by his friend’s smile.)

In the end, Edelgard escaped. Gravely wounded, but alive nevertheless. She left behind a field of flames and a mountain of corpses, though Dimitri had played a bigger part in its creation than she as she had been content to watch and wait for his approach. Felix had been too busy with his own hill of death to see what he had done to his victims, the poor fools getting in the way of a man hellbent on taking their Emperor’s head.

His own sister’s head.

Felix’s lips pursed thin at the thought that came with the memory of a younger Dimitri mourning a missed chance for a dance.

Gronder Field was a testament to the ruins of both Dimitri and Edelgard and what their relationship once had been – or could have been, in better times, and perhaps Felix too would have been happier in that dreamy what-if world.

But in reality they got this: two siblings and their nations at war, with oceans worth of blood spilt between them, all of their past acquaintances dragged into the ongoing massacre.

Somewhere, Felix’s father was assisting the healers: he knew this as surely as he knew the feeling of Dimitri’s heartbeat against his fingers from years and years of holding onto Dimitri’s wrist before Dimitri began hiding it along with the rest of himself.

Somewhere, Ingrid was scolding Sylvain for his recklessness yet again – the same old song, the same old words, and Felix could imagine Ingrid’s tired irritation as though it were his own. As though they hadn’t lost enough loved ones – but that was also a reason for why Sylvain did what he did.

Dedue must be somewhere close by, too, but as Felix’s eyes caught sight of Dimitri’s hunched form, the rest of his thoughts whizzed out and only the sound of his own hurrying steps registered.

And a girl, approaching Dimitri at the same time as he from a different side, something manic and decisive in the rhythm of her stride.

Felix caught the glint of a dagger slipping from her sleeve, and –

Time runs out like a thief into the night.

Felix had always had faster reflexes than Glenn – it had been one of the few things he bested his brother at, even though it had never scored him a victory in their sparring matches. But Glenn had praised him for this quality of his, and Felix had puffed with pride whenever he got so much as a compiment from his older brother.

Father used to watch them sparring, always making time to catch at least some of it, but his presence at the training grounds vanished soon after Glenn’s death, leaving Felix alone to train, train, train until his lungs and legs ached.

Felix had always been the fast one, while Dimitri had the ridiculous monster strength the Blaiddyd bloodline was known for.

Even as the rather mousy-looking girl struck the dagger toward Dimitri’s vulnerable neck as he sat on the ground, back turned towards her, Felix still closed the distance in time, heartbeats loud in his illness-rattled chest.

_Dimitri,_ his heart called out, _Dima._

The dagger sunk into his flesh, too deep, too close to his heart, but in the heat of the moment Felix barely noticed as he struck her with a thunder spell, magic tingling on his fingertips as the girl screamed like a banshee of revenge, of the dead getting their tribute, her words a hollow echo of Dimitri’s from before.

Her words died with her soon enough – or perhaps he simply didn’t hear them over the pain that now erupted through him like an earthquake. He sunk to his knees just as Dimitri whipped around, finally awoken from whatever stupor he had been post-battle, and a wet cough escaped Felix along with blood and petals.

Despite the situation, Felix still found it regretful he couldn’t hide it from Dimitri completely.

(Glenn’s voice, scolding him: ”You don’t need to copy _everything_ that I do, Felix!”)

”Felix,” Dimitri said, cradling Felix’s face between his hands. One of them lacked the usual gauntlet, Felix noted distantly through his laborious and pained breathing. The blood on the hand – Felix couldn’t tell if it was Imperial blood or his own. It didn’t matter.

There was still time, but not much, not with the branches in his lungs and the dagger shoved deep between his shoulderblades.

Felix opened his eyes, exhaled, and glared at the face so close to his own. It was the closest he had seen Dimitri’s face up close for many years, and cold, exhausted fear shone on it like the fires behind them across Gronder. A flash of anger rose in Felix, but it too was a tired feeling, its flames exhausted away over the years of helplessness.

Petals stuck to the corner of his mouth, but Felix paid it no mind as he lifted a hand to his lips to tug the glove off with his teeth. He somehow managed to pull it off, even between wheezing and spitting out petals that thankfully didn’t bear resemblance to a rose's.

Goddess, how mortifying it would have been to cough roses on Dimitri as he slowly died both of his illness and the dagger stuck deep into him.

Dimitri stared at him unseeingly, uncomprehending, until Felix sighed and brought his uncovered hand over Dimitri’s bare hand filled with scars he’d been so self-conscious of at the Academy. The sole visible eye widened in understanding – finally – and he let their hands fall from Felix’s face, instead choosing to drape his thicker, clumsier fingers between Felix’s like he had done an uncountable number of times in the past.

Dimitri squeezed, hesitant and scared, and Felix sighed through the tightness in his chest.

”You are, without a doubt,” Felix wheezed out, blood dripping down his lips, ”the biggest fool I’ve ever met.”

Dimitri’s hand shook in Felix’s, and the one pressed against his cheek didn’t fare much better. Or perhaps it was Felix’s body, trembling from the pain and and over a decade old love that shouldn’t have lasted as long as it did.

”You shouldn’t have,” Dimitri said, voice low and cracked, ”I was the target.”

”Just because you want to die,” Felix said back with as much sneer and dignity as one spitting flowers and blood could manage, ”doesn’t mean we want you to. Or that I’d let you.”

”More than the dead,” Felix continued as he leaned up to push his forehead against Dimitri’s, ignoring the blood and sweat that mingled, ”the living need you. Lift your gaze up from your damn feet, and you might actually see something for once.”

Dimitri’s eye squinted at the sudden proximity, his lips quivering as he said, ”I promised them, Felix. I _promised_.”

”The dead don’t _care_,” Felix groaned. ”Only the living do.”

Dimitri’s nose brushed against his, and Dimitri’s breath felt like a ghost on his lips. Felix held his hand tighter, with all the dying strength he could muster. Dimitri’s fingers trembled, and Felix sighed, allowing himself the last concession, ”_I_ care, Dima.”

The bitterest part of Felix felt satisfaction at the sight that followed: Dimitri’s face going slack, eye as wide as it could be, as though he had been struck with a blade himself. Felix hated himself, for that feeling, but somewhere between the cracks of Dimitri’s expression was the boy Felix had missed every day for who knew how long, the one he’d been looking for with the same desperation Sylvain and Glenn used to make fun of him for.

(”Felix, come on, Dimitri’s going to hang out some other time, it’s not the end of the world.” Glenn’s hand in his hair, as soothing as it was mocking. ”I’ll take good care of him for you, alright?”)

”Felix,” Dimitri said, painfully choked, his fingers gripping Felix’s hard enough to hurt, ”don’t go.”

Another, harder fit of coughs followed Dimitri’s words, but Felix smiled despite himself and the disgusting mixture of blood, saliva, and petals wheezing out of him, sarcastic but somehow still genuine as he squeezed Dimitri’s fingers. ”Tag,” he rasped into the space between their mouths, ”you’re it.”

_Sorry, Sylvain, I’m going first._

(Children’s feet stomping over a grass field, and one of the children reaches out for the other, fingers barely brushing at the dark blue fabric of a tunic –)

_Did I finally catch you, Dima?_

xxiii. rain lilies.

Through the thick furs of his cape, the sun’s shine felt suffocating, overbearing as Dimitri stood at the monastery’s graveyard, in front of the one specific grave he had never wished to look at. _Felix Hugo Fraldarius_, the stone declared, and the engraved letters burned through Dimitri’s heart, filling him with guilt.

Footsteps approached him, but Dimitri didn’t need to look up from the many bouquets of flowers covering the grave to know who it was. ”Rodrigue,” he said, and the name sent another dosage of pain through him. ”It appears I keep taking your sons from you.”

Rodrigue stopped at his side, his hand raising to his arm and touching it when Dimitri didn’t move away. It was… almost comforting, even though physical touches still put Dimitri on the edge. ”Your Highness,” Rodrigue said, unbearably understanding and accommodating even in his grief, ”you have never taken anything from me.”

Dimitri laughed, the sound short and hollow. ”Neither of them had to die. If I wasn’t–”

Rodrigue’s hand pressed down more firmly, and Dimitri went silent, gaze still downcast. ”Glenn and Felix,” he said with a quiet emphasis, ”only did what their hearts thought right in the moment, the impulsive boys that they are… were.” Rodrigue paused, perhaps to collect himself after the slip-up. ”Felix, in particular… he’s a stubborn boy, but he always does what his heart feels is right.”

_He didn’t want you to die _went unsaid, but it lingered in the air and in Dimitri’s head. Despite it all, Felix hadn’t wanted him to die.

”I didn’t want him to...” Dimitri’s voice trailed off and his shoulders fell as his gaze went up toward the sky. Clear, cloudless. Too bright and warm. Dimitri’s tongue felt clumsy in his mouth as he murmured, ”...It ought to be raining.”

Rodrigue’s hand moved up to his shoulder, and settled there when Dimitri didn’t shudder away. ”It has been raining long enough, Your Highness,” he whispered. ”It’s time to let the sun in, don’t you think?”

The weight of Rodrigue’s hand on him as well as those words made Dimitri deflate, something awfully twisted in him beginning to unknot itself. Slowly, painfully slowly, but it was a start. ”Perhaps,” he said, unsurely, ”perhaps you are right, my friend.”

He cast his gaze down once more upon the fresh rain lilies on the grave, rather unremarkable among the other more colourful flowers people that didn’t know Felix that well had left.

”It’s not the time for regrets,” he murmured to the grave and its exhibition of flowers. ”Is that not right, Felix?”

If a grave could agree, Dimitri mused, perhaps it would feel like this.

A memory, long-forgotten by Felix but which had recently resurfaced in Dimitri’s mind:

Dimitri, now a fourteen-year-old boy with more ghosts than years to his name, rather wished he hadn’t come to this ball at all, despite knowing Lord Rodrigue had only meant well and to give him a chance to socialize after long months of recovery and isolation. Still, as he stared at his too bare and scarred hands, Dimitri wished he hadn’t come, even though Fraldarius had always felt like a second home to him before.

The girl he had chanced a dance with had grimaced at the sight of his hands – at the feel of them – and the look remained imprinted on his mind. _Disgusting,_ _what ugly, __brutish__ hands._

Would El have said the same? The thought vanished as soon as it emerged.

Walking through the back garden of the Fraldarius estate offered very little in terms of peace of mind, as the memories of Glenn came trickling back strong and left him trembling as he folded his arms and hid his hands. He felt sorry for leaving Dedue back at the dancing hall by himself, but he had asked Rodrigue to show Dedue to the unoccupied gardens so as to give the other boy some peace from the narrow-eyed glares the nobles sent his way.

”Dimitri?” A familiar voice called out to him, traces of anger not directed at Dimitri audible in the way it said his name. Dimitri lifted his gaze to see his friend of many years walk up to him from the eastern side of the garden. ”Got fed up with the old man’s idea of cheering you up, huh?”

”Felix,” Dimitri breathed out, uncrossing his arms out of the sheer relief hearing and seeing Felix evoked in him. ”What a relief. I thought you might be ill, since Rodrigue didn’t say–”

”Fuck him,” Felix said, voice cracking from anger, eyes flashing as it was his turn to cross arms over his chest. He hadn’t bothered with formal wear, which wasn’t a surprise, but made Dimitri feel all the more awkward in his stuffy clothes.

Dimitri gasped, scandalized. ”Where did you pick up such language–”

”Never mind that,” Felix said with a long, irritated sigh. ”It’s a pain to have all these nobles around. Come spar with me, if you’re not going to bother with them.”

Dimitri perked up at that. He couldn’t deny he wasn’t in the mood for dancing anymore – as enjoyable as El had initially made it for him it just wasn’t the same now – and sparring with Felix had always been fun and engaging, especially with Glenn supervising…

Felix had turned his back to him without waiting for response, walking away through the silence surrounding them.

Dimitri blinked, and suddenly he could almost see the garden alight with flames around them, hear the crackling and the screams, see Glenn’s back turned toward him as he walked away from the prince too cowardly to follow.

_Run, Dimitri,_ Glenn’s voice whispered, urgent and broken, _run._

”Wait,” Dimitri choked out, heart threatening to race right out of his chest as he reached his hand out towards Felix’s retreating back, ”don’t go...”

”What are you talking about?” Felix’s head flicked towards him, narrow eyes staring at him over the other’s shoulder as a hand closed around his. The familiar feeling extinguished the flames in Dimitri’s mind, and the unperturbed stare calmed him as Felix muttered, ”We’re going together, as usual.”

”Right,” Dimitri said, a little breathless as he stumbled forward, ”of course.”

”Your Highness,” Rodrigue said gently, ”it’s time to go.”

”Yes,” Dimitri agreed, though it pained him to do so. ”There is much I must overcome.”

And indeed, when he lifted his gaze and turned away from the grave, the sight that greeted him was this: the remaining Blue Lions standing close together, their gazes on him gentle and waiting, as well as Alois, Seteth and Flayn. Gustave. Off to the side stood the professor, their arms crossed but posture relaxed, a small smile upon their lips.

All of them, waiting for him.

_Lift your gaze up from your damn feet._

With a deep, anguished breath, Dimitri walked forward, step by step.

Reached his hand out.

_You might actually see something._

And they reached their hands out to him in return, despite it all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternative (scrapped) endings/scenes:  
\- dimitri braids ingrid's hair as a way to practice being gentle again, says that "felix taught him" and gets a lil melancholy  
\- rodrigue reminiscing of tiny felix declaring his intent to marry dima (i mean it's implied in the fic as is, but)  
\- the childhood trio huddled together like they did when they were children, except the bed doesn't quite fit them anymore, some melancholia about them being only a trio now  
\- gautier cheese gratin jokes because felix enjoyed that too apparently if I remember right  
\- something about king dimitri visiting the monastery and its graveyard once a year, after mid-Pegasus Moon, and leaves rain lilies there (if you didn't check, rain lilies [rainflowers] can mean "I love you back", "I must atone for my sins" and "I will never forget you")
> 
> I'm pretty happy with the one I went with, though, because Hopefulness and all that. Reach out to you friends, the true ones are waiting for you. I hope this was a decent read altogether for you all; getting this out is a really big relief for me, but if you feel like letting me know how you felt about this, I'd love to hear from you. (Fine, you may hire a hitman to kill me if you so wish.)

**Author's Note:**

> (slaps this fic in the ass) this bad boy contains so many self-indulgent dimilix headcanons you have no idea


End file.
